Arizona: Dead heat between Trump and Clinton in latest Emerson poll
By Emerson published the results of a new poll on October 23. In this poll, interviewees from Arizona were asked for whom they will vote: Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Emerson poll results
According to the results, 44.0% of respondents will vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, while 42.0% intend to vote for billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out from October 2 to October 4 with 600 likely voters. If one accounts for the poll's margin of error of +/-3.9 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As a general rule, however, one should not have too much faith in the results of single polls, since they often incorporate large errors. Rather than relying on results from single polls, you should rely on combined polls or, even better, a combined 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, you can convert them into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure yields figures of 51.2% for Clinton and 48.8% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
Clinton can currently count on 50.9% of the major two-party vote according to an average of recent polls in Arizona. This value is 0.3 percentage points lower than his respective numbers in the Emerson 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 latest PollyVote anticipates Clinton to gain 48.0% of the two-party vote in Arizona. Hence, the PollyVote forecast is 3.2 points below his polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin shows that this deviation is negligible.
