KABC/SurveyUSA poll in California: Clinton with whopping lead
By Results of a new poll conducted by KABC/SurveyUSA were circulated. The poll asked participants from California for whom they will vote: Donald·Trump or Hillary·Clinton.
KABC/SurveyUSA poll results
Of those who responded, 59.0% said that they plan to vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, while 33.0% declared that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted from September 27 to September 28, among a random sample of 732 likely voters. Considering the poll's sampling error of +/-3.6 percentage points, the difference in voter support is statistically significant.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Hence, a good strategy is to not have too much confidence in the results of a single poll. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, forecasting research recommends to look at combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that incorporates different methods and data.
In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from other methods, you can translate them into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure yields figures of 64.1% for Clinton and 35.9% for Trump.
Results vs. other polls
Looking at an average of California polls, Clinton's two-party vote share is currently at 61.7%. This value is 2.5 percentage points lower than her respective numbers in the KABC/SurveyUSA poll. 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 latest PollyVote foresees Clinton to gain 61.3% of the two-party vote in California. Hence, the combined PollyVote is 2.8 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin indicates that this deviation is negligible.
