Maine: Clinton holds steady advantage in new Emerson poll
By Emerson published the results of a new poll on October 10. In this poll, respondents from Maine were asked for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
Emerson poll results
Of those who replied, 44.0% said that they plan to vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whereas 35.0% revealed that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from September 2 to September 5. A total of 800 likely voters responded. There is a sampling error of +/-3.4 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the gap between both candidates is statistically significant.
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. At the very least, one should examine how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
For the following analysis, we translate Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. This yields figures of 55.7% for Clinton and 44.3% for Trump.
Results vs. other polls
If we look at an average of Maine polls, Clinton's two-party vote share is currently at 53.1%. In comparison to her numbers in the Emerson poll Clinton's poll average is 2.6 percentage points worse. This deviation is within the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll compared with PollyVote's prediction
The most recent PollyVote anticipates Clinton to gain 54.6% of the two-party vote in Maine. Hence, Polly's combined forecast is 1.1 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's margin of error indicates that this difference is negligible.
