North Carolina: Tossup between Trump and Clinton in new Gravis poll
By Gravis published the results of a new poll. In this poll, participants from North Carolina were asked for whom they will vote: Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Gravis poll results
Of those who answered the question, 44.0% said that they plan to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, while 43.0% indicated that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from September 23 to September 23. A total of 694 likely voters responded. The error margin is +/-3.7 points, which means that the levels of voter support for both parties' candidates do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Therefore, as a general rule, don't be overly confident the results of a single poll. Rather, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
For the following analysis, we convert Clinton's and Trump's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. The resulting figures are 50.6% for Clinton and 49.4% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
An average of recent polls in North Carolina has Clinton at 51.5% of the two-party vote. Relative to her numbers in the Gravis poll Clinton's poll average is 0.9 percentage points higher. This difference is within the poll's error margin, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote prediction
The latest PollyVote expects Clinton to gain 49.7% of the two-party vote in North Carolina. That is, the PollyVote is 0.9 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error suggests that this deviation is negligible.
