Michigan: 10 points lead for Clinton in latest Detroit Free Press poll
By Detroit Free Press published the results of a new poll. In this poll, participants from Michigan were asked for whom they will vote: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
Detroit Free Press poll results
Of those who answered the question, 46.0% said that they are going to vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, while 36.0% declared that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from October 1 to October 3 with 600 likely voters. If one takes into account the poll's margin of error of +/-4.0 percentage points, the spread in voter support 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 may contain large errors. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, the best practice is to look at combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that uses different methods and data.
To make the results comparable to forecasts from other methods, one can convert them into shares of the two-party vote. This yields figures of 56.1% for Clinton and 43.9% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
If we look at an average of Michigan polls, Clinton's two-party vote share is currently at 57.0%. This value is 0.9 percentage points higher than her corresponding numbers in the Detroit Free Press poll. This difference is within the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The most recent PollyVote anticipates Clinton to gain 54.6% of the two-party vote in Michigan. This means that the combined PollyVote is 1.5 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's margin of error indicates that this deviation is insignificant.
