OpinionWorks poll in Maryland: Clinton with 29 points lead
By OpinionWorks published the results of a new poll. In this poll, interviewees from Maryland were asked for whom they will vote: Republican nominee Donald Trump or Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton.
OpinionWorks poll results
The results show that 54.0% of participants plan to give their vote to former First Lady Hillary Clinton, whereas 25.0% would vote for billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out from August 18 to August 30 among 754 likely voters. The error margin is +/-3.6 percentage points, which means that the levels of voter support for the Republican and the Democratic candidate differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Therefore, as a general rule, a good strategy is to not put too much trust in the results of a single poll. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, the best practice scientific advice is to use combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that relies on forecasts from different methods, each of which relies on different data.
To make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, we translate them into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure results in figures of 68.4% for Clinton and 31.7% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
Clinton currently runs at 69.5% of the major two-party vote in an average of recent polls in Maryland. This value is 1.1 percentage points higher than her corresponding numbers in the OpinionWorks poll. This difference is within the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll in comparison with PollyVote's prediction
The latest PollyVote expects Clinton to gain 65.7% of the two-party vote in Maryland. Hence, Polly's forecast is 2.7 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error suggests that this difference is negligible.
