NBC-WSJ-Marist poll in North Carolina: Clinton with 5 points lead
By Results of a new poll carried out by NBC-WSJ-Marist were announced. The poll asked interviewees from North Carolina for whom they will vote: Donald·Trump or Hillary·Clinton.
NBC-WSJ-Marist poll results
Of those who responded, 48.0% said that they plan to vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whereas 43.0% declared that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out from October 10 to October 12 with 743 likely voters. There is a sampling error of +/-3.6 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, one should not be overly confident the results of an individual poll. At least, one should examine how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, we convert them into two-party vote shares. This yields figures of 52.8% for Clinton and 47.3% for Trump.
Results in comparison to other polls
If we look at an average of North Carolina polls, Clinton's two-party vote share is currently at 51.7%. This value is 1.1 percentage points lower than her respective numbers in the NBC-WSJ-Marist poll. This difference is within the poll's margin of error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll in comparison with PollyVote's forecast
The most recent PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 49.8% of the two-party vote in North Carolina. Hence, Polly's prediction is 3.0 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error shows that this difference is insignificant.
