Texas: Negligible advantage for Trump in new WFAA-TV/SurveyUSA poll
Results of a new poll carried out by WFAA-TV/SurveyUSA were released. The poll asked respondents from Texas for whom they will vote: Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton or Republican candidate Donald Trump.
WFAA-TV/SurveyUSA poll results
The results show that 43.0% of participants indicated that they would cast a ballot for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whereas 47.0% would vote for billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from October 10 to October 12 with 638 likely voters.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Thus, as a general rule, you should not rely too much on the results of a single poll. At the very least, one should examine how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
To make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, you can translate them into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure yields figures of 47.8% for Clinton and 52.2% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
Trump currently runs at 52.7% of the two-party vote according to an average of recent polls in Texas. Relative to his numbers in the WFAA-TV/SurveyUSA poll Trump's poll average is 0.5 percentage points better.
The poll compared with PollyVote's prediction
The current PollyVote expects Trump to gain 53.9% of the two-party vote in Texas. Hence, Polly's prediction is 1.7 points above his polling numbers.