North Carolina: Tossup between Trump and Clinton in new Remington Research (R) poll
Remington Research (R) published the results of a new poll. In this poll, respondents from North Carolina were asked for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
Remington Research (R) poll results
Of those who answered the question, 44.0% said that they plan to vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whereas 47.0% indicated that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted from October 20 to October 22, among a random sample of 1764 likely voters. The sampling error is +/-2.3 points. This means that the poll results for the two candidates do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Hence, a good strategy is to not have too much confidence in the results of an individual poll. Rather, one should examine how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
For the following analysis, we translate the candidates' raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. This yields figures of 48.4% for Clinton and 51.7% for Trump.
Results in comparison to other polls
Trump currently runs at 48.3% of the major two-party vote in an average of recent polls in North Carolina. This value is 3.4 percentage points lower than her corresponding numbers in the Remington Research (R) poll. This margin is outside the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote prediction
The latest PollyVote anticipates Trump to gain 49.3% of the two-party vote in North Carolina. This means that the combined PollyVote is 2.4 points below her polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is thus outside the poll's sampling error.