Nevada: Clinton tied with Trump in latest Emerson poll
Emerson published the results of a new poll. In this poll, interviewees from Nevada were asked for whom they will vote: Republican nominee Donald Trump or Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton.
In Nevada, the popular vote is usually decided by a narrow margin. Therefore, the state is commonly referred to as a swing state, which makes it particularly interesting from a forecasting perspective.
Emerson poll results
According to the results, businessman Donald Trump and former First Lady Hillary Clinton have the same level of support, each with 43.0% of the vote.
The poll was conducted from October 2 to October 4. A total of 700 likely voters responded. The margin of error is +/-3.6 percentage points. This means that the levels of voter support for the Republican and the Democratic candidate do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
Single polls often include large biases, and should be interpreted with caution. Instead of relying on results from single polls, the evidence-based approach is to use combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that uses forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from other methods, you can translate them into two-party vote shares. The results of the actual poll mean 50.0 % for Clinton and 50.0 % for Trump concerning the two-party vote share.
Results compared to other polls
An average of recent polls in Nevada sees Clinton at 50.7% of the two-party vote. When compared to the average forecast of other polls Clinton performed 0.7 percentage points worse in the poll. This difference is outside the poll's margin of error, which means that the poll is an outlier.
The poll in comparison with PollyVote's forecast
The most recent PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 51.0% and Trump 49.0% of the two-party vote in Nevada. Clinton has 1 percentage points less when the results of the poll are compared to the combined PollyVote forecast for Nevada. Again, a look at the poll's error margin indicates that this difference is significant.