Latest WBUR/MassINC poll in Massachusetts: Trump trails by a whopping margin
By WBUR/MassINC published the results of a new poll. In this poll, interviewees from Massachusetts were asked for whom they will vote: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
WBUR/MassINC poll results
Of those who answered the question, 57.0% said that they intend to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, while 31.0% declared that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from October 13 to October 16. A total of 502 likely voters responded. The error margin is +/-4.4 points. This means that the poll results for Clinton and Trump differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
In general, however, a good strategy is to not have too much faith in the results of single polls, because they may contain large errors. Rather than relying on results from single polls, the recommended strategy look at combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that uses forecasts from different methods, each of which uses different data.
In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, we convert them into two-party vote shares. This procedure results in figures of 64.8% for Clinton and 35.2% for Trump.
Results vs. other polls
An average of recent polls in Massachusetts sees Clinton at 64.2% of the two-party vote. This value is 0.6 percentage points lower than her respective numbers in the WBUR/MassINC poll. This difference is within the poll's margin of error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote prediction
The most recent PollyVote anticipates Clinton to gain 64.5% of the two-party vote in Massachusetts. Hence, the PollyVote is 0.3 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin reveals that this deviation is insignificant.
