Maryland: New OpinionWorks poll shows Trump trailing by 29 points
Results of a new poll conducted by OpinionWorks were released. The poll asked respondents from Maryland for whom they will vote: Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.
OpinionWorks poll results
According to the results, 54.0% of respondents indicated that they would vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, whereas 25.0% plan to vote for real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from August 18 to August 30. A total of 754 likely voters responded. The sampling error is +/-3.6 points. This means that the levels of voter support for the Republican and the Democratic candidate differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
Individual polls often incorporate substantial errors, and should be treated with caution. Instead of relying on 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.
For the following analysis, we translate Clinton's and Trump's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure results in values of 68.4% for Clinton and 31.7% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
Clinton can currently count on 69.5% of the major two-party vote according to an average of recent polls in Maryland. Compared to her numbers in the OpinionWorks poll Clinton's poll average is 1.1 percentage points better. This margin is within the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The current PollyVote forecasts Clinton to gain 66.0% of the two-party vote in Maryland. That is, Polly's prediction is 2.4 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error indicates that this deviation is insignificant.