Tennessee: New Vanderbilt University*Vanderbilt* poll has Clinton behind by 11 points
Vanderbilt UniversityVanderbilt published the results of a new poll. In this poll, interviewees from Tennessee were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton or Republican candidate Donald Trump.
Vanderbilt UniversityVanderbilt poll results
According to the results, 33.0% of participants plan to give their vote to former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whereas 44.0% intend to vote for businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from September 19 to October 2. A total of 1000 registered voters responded. If one accounts for the poll's sampling error of +/-3.4 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 often contain large errors. Rather than relying on results from single polls, forecasting research recommends to rely on combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that draws upon different methods and data.
For the following comparison, we convert Clinton's and Trump's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. This yields figures of 42.9% for Clinton and 57.1% for Trump.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote prediction
The most recent PollyVote foresees Trump to gain 59.1% of the two-party vote in Tennessee. That is, Polly's combined forecast is 2.0 points above his polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is therefore in line with the poll's sampling error.