Latest UMass Lowell/7News*UMass Lowell/7News* poll in New Hampshire: Trump trails by a marginal margin
By UMass Lowell/7NewsUMass Lowell/7News published the results of a new poll. In this poll, participants from New Hampshire were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton or Republican candidate Donald Trump.
In New Hampshire, the popular vote is usually close. This is the reason why the state is commonly viewed as a battleground state, which makes it particularly interesting from a forecasting perspective.
UMass Lowell/7NewsUMass Lowell/7News poll results
Of those who responded, 45.0% said that they would vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while 39.0% declared that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from October 7 to October 11. A total of 517 likely voters responded. There is a sampling error of +/-4.9 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. Hence, don't rely too much on the results of a single poll. At least, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, you can convert them into two-party vote shares. The respective figures are 53.6% for Clinton and 46.4% for Trump.
Results compared to other polls
If we look at an average of New Hampshire polls, Clinton's current two-party vote share is at 52.5%. In comparison to her numbers in the UMass Lowell/7NewsUMass Lowell/7News poll Clinton's poll average is 1.1 percentage points worse. This difference is within the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The latest PollyVote anticipates Clinton to gain 52.7% of the two-party vote in New Hampshire. Hence, the PollyVote is 0.9 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's margin of error shows that this difference is negligible.
