Emerson poll in Arkansas: Clinton trails by a huge margin
By Emerson released the results of a new poll, in which respondents from Arkansas were asked for whom they will vote: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
Emerson poll results
Of those who answered the question, 29.0% said that they plan to vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while 57.0% declared that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted between September 9 and September 13. The sample size was 600 likely voters. The margin of error is +/-3.9 percentage points, which means that the levels of voter support for Trump and Clinton differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
In general, however, you should not have too much faith in the results of single polls, because they can contain large errors. Rather than relying on results from single polls, the evidence-based approach is to look at combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that includes different methods and data.
In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from other methods, one can convert them into shares of the two-party vote. The resulting figures are 33.7% for Clinton and 66.3% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
Trump can currently count on 64.0% of the two-party vote according to an average of recent polls in Arkansas. Relative to his numbers in the Emerson poll Trump's poll average is 2.3 percentage points lower. This difference is within the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The latest PollyVote anticipates Trump to gain 58.7% of the two-party vote in Arkansas. This means that the combined PollyVote is 7.6 points below his polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin shows that this deviation is significant.
