North Carolina: Clinton and Trump virtually tied in new SurveyUSA poll

SurveyUSA released the results of a new poll, in which respondents from North Carolina were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton or Republican candidate Donald Trump.

Of those who answered the question, 48.0% said that they would vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whereas 46.0% revealed that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.

The poll was carried out from October 14 to October 16 among 651 likely voters. There is a sampling error of +/-3.9 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the race is currently a statistical tie.

Putting the results in context

Single polls can contain large biases, which is why they should be treated with caution. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, the best practice is to look at combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that draws upon different methods and data.

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. For comparison: Only 48.9% was obtained by Clinton in the SurveyUSA poll on February 16, for Trump this number was 51.1%.

Comparison to other polls

Clinton currently runs at 51.7% of the major two-party vote in an average of recent polls in North Carolina. In comparison to her numbers in the SurveyUSA poll Clinton's poll average is 0.6 percentage points better. This deviation is within the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is not an outlier.

Results compared to the combined PollyVote forecast

The latest PollyVote expects Clinton to gain 50.2% of the two-party vote in North Carolina. This means that the PollyVote forecast is 0.9 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's margin of error reveals that this deviation is insignificant.

This article was automatically generated by the PollyBot, which uses algorithms developed by AX Semantics to generate text from data stored in our API. The exact dataset underlying this particular article can be found here.

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