Wisconsin: Clear lead for Clinton in recent WPR/St. Norbert poll
WPR/St. Norbert released the results of a new poll, in which respondents from Wisconsin were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.
WPR/St. Norbert poll results
Of those who replied, 47.0% said that they are going to vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, while 39.0% said that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted between October 13 and October 16. The sample size was 644 likely voters. The error margin is +/-3.8 points, which means that the poll results for Trump and Clinton differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Thus, as a general rule, a good strategy is to not focus too much on the results of a single poll. Rather than relying on results from single polls, the evidence-based approach is to consult combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that draws upon different methods and data.
To make the results comparable to forecasts from other methods, you can convert them into two-party vote shares. This procedure yields values of 54.7% for Clinton and 45.4% for Trump. To compare: 57.5% was obtained by Clinton in the WPR/St. Norbert poll on April 15, for Trump this result was only 42.5%.
Comparison to other polls
Clinton currently achieves 53.6% of the major two-party vote in an average of recent polls in Wisconsin. Relative to her numbers in the WPR/St. Norbert poll Clinton's poll average is 1.1 percentage points worse. This difference is within the poll's margin of error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The latest PollyVote expects Clinton to gain 53.8% of the two-party vote in Wisconsin. That is, the PollyVote is 0.9 points below her polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is thus in line with the poll's sampling error.