Latest Emerson poll in Arizona: Trump and Clinton in a virtual tie
By Results of a new poll carried out by Emerson were circulated. The poll asked respondents from Arizona for whom they will vote: Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton or Republican candidate Donald Trump.
Emerson poll results
Of those who responded, 44.0% said that they intend to vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, while 42.0% said that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from October 2 to October 4 among 600 likely voters. Considering the poll's error margin of +/-3.9 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As a general rule, however, a good strategy is to not have too much faith in the results of single polls, since they sometimes contain large errors. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, the best practice scientific advice is to rely on combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that relies on different methods and data.
To make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, one can translate them into shares of the two-party vote. The corresponding figures are 51.2% for Clinton and 48.8% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
Clinton is currently at 50.9% of the major two-party vote according to an average of recent polls in Arizona. In comparison to her numbers in the Emerson poll Clinton's poll average is 0.3 percentage points lower. This margin is within the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote forecast
The current PollyVote expects Clinton to gain 48.7% of the two-party vote in Arizona. This means that Polly's prediction is 2.5 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error reveals that this deviation is negligible.
