Virginia: Sustained lead for Clinton in Quinnipiac poll
By Results of a new poll carried out by Quinnipiac were circulated on October 5. The poll asked participants from Virginia for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
Virginia is traditionally a swing state, where the Democrats and the GOP have historically won similar levels of support among voters. This is the reason why the election outcome here is considered critical in determining who will win the majority of electoral votes.
Quinnipiac poll results
Of those who replied, 50.0% said that they are going to vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while 43.0% declared that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out from September 13 to September 21 among 659 likely voters. There is a sampling error of +/-3.9 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the race is currently a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. As a result, don't be overly confident the results of an individual poll. Rather than relying on results from single polls, you should look at combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that relies on different methods and data.
For the following comparison, we convert the candidates' raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. This procedure yields values of 53.8% for Clinton and 46.2% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
An average of recent polls in Virginia sees Clinton at 55.6% of the two-party vote. This value is 1.8 percentage points higher than her respective numbers in the Quinnipiac poll. This deviation is within the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The current PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 50.9% of the two-party vote in Virginia. This means that the PollyVote forecast is 2.9 points below her polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is thus in line with the poll's sampling error.
