OpinionWorks poll in Maryland: Trump trails by a huge margin
OpinionWorks released the results of a new poll, in which respondents from Maryland were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.
OpinionWorks poll results
Of those who replied, 54.0% said that they intend to vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whereas 25.0% said that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from August 18 to August 30 among 754 likely voters. There is a sampling error of +/-3.6 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the gap between both candidates is statistically significant.
Putting the results in context
In general, however, you should not have too much faith in the results of single polls, as they often incorporate large errors. At least, one should examine how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
For the following analysis, we translate the candidates' raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. This procedure results in values of 68.4% for Clinton and 31.7% for Trump.
Results vs. other polls
An average of recent polls in Maryland sees Clinton at 69.5% of the two-party vote. In comparison to her numbers in the OpinionWorks poll Clinton's poll average is 1.1 percentage points better. This deviation is within the poll's error margin, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll compared with PollyVote's prediction
The latest PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 64.9% of the two-party vote in Maryland. Hence, the combined PollyVote is 3.5 points below her polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is thus in line with the poll's margin of error.