New Jersey: New Emerson poll has Trump behind by 4 points
Results of a new poll conducted by Emerson were circulated. The poll asked interviewees from New Jersey for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
Emerson poll results
The results show that 47.0% of respondents indicated to vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whereas 43.0% are going to vote for businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out from September 2 to September 5 with 800 likely voters. The error margin is +/-3.4 points. This means that the levels of voter support for Trump and Clinton do not 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, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
To make the results comparable to forecasts from other methods, one can translate them into shares of the two-party vote. This yields figures of 52.2% for Clinton and 47.8% for Trump.
Results in comparison to other polls
An average of recent polls in New Jersey has Clinton at 56.3% of the two-party vote. Relative to her numbers in the Emerson poll Clinton's poll average is 4.1 percentage points higher. This difference is outside the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The most recent PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 57.5% of the two-party vote in New Jersey. Hence, the PollyVote is 5.3 points above her polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is thus outside the poll's sampling error.