Florida: Clinton and Trump neck-and-neck in latest Gravis poll
Gravis released the results of a new poll, in which respondents from Florida were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.
Florida is traditionally a battleground state, where the Democratic and Republican candidates have historically achieved similar levels of support among voters. This is why the election outcome here is considered critical in determining which party will win the majority of electoral votes.
Gravis poll results
Of those who answered the question, 47.0% said that they intend to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, while 45.0% declared that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out from October 4 to October 4 with 821 registered voters. There is a sampling error of +/-3.4 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the race is currently a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
Single polls should be treated with caution, since they often include large errors. Instead of relying on results from single polls, the recommended strategy look at combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that incorporates forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
For the following comparison, we convert Clinton's and Trump's raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. The resulting figures are 51.1% for Clinton and 48.9% for Trump. To compare: Only 50.0% was gained by Clinton in the Gravis poll on June 28, for Trump this result was 50.0%.
Results compared to other polls
If we look at an average of Florida polls, Clinton's two-party vote share is currently at 51.6%. This value is 0.5 percentage points higher than her corresponding numbers in the Gravis poll. This margin is within the poll's margin of error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll compared with PollyVote's forecast
The latest PollyVote expects Clinton to gain 50.4% of the two-party vote in Florida. This means that Polly's forecast is 0.7 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin suggests that this deviation is insignificant.