Florida: Trump and Clinton virtually tied in new Gravis poll
By Results of a new poll administered by Gravis were announced. The poll asked respondents from Florida for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
Florida is traditionally a purple state, where the Republican and Democratic candidates have historically achieved similar levels of support among voters. Hence, the election outcome here is viewed as critical in determining who will win the majority of electoral votes.
Gravis poll results
Of those who answered the question, 47.0% said that they plan to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whereas 45.0% said that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out from October 4 to October 4 among 821 registered voters. The sampling error is +/-3.4 percentage points. This means that the poll results for the candidates of both parties do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
In general, however, one should not have too much faith in the results of single polls, because they sometimes incorporate large errors. At the very least, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
For the following analysis, we translate Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. This yields figures of 51.1% for Clinton and 48.9% for Trump. On June 28 Clinton obtained only 50.0% in the Gravis poll and Trump obtained 50.0%.
Comparison to other polls
An average of recent polls in Florida has Clinton at 51.9% of the two-party vote. Compared to her numbers in the Gravis poll Clinton's poll average is 0.8 percentage points higher. This deviation is within the poll's margin of error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote forecast
The current PollyVote expects Clinton to gain 51.0% of the two-party vote in Florida. Hence, Polly's forecast is 0.1 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error reveals that this difference is negligible.
