Clinton leads in California by 26 points in new PPIC poll
By Results of a new poll conducted by PPIC were distributed. The poll asked respondents from California for whom they will vote: Donald·Trump or Hillary·Clinton.
PPIC poll results
Of those who answered the question, 54.0% said that they intend to vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, whereas 28.0% indicated that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted from October 14 to October 23, among a random sample of 1024 likely voters. The sampling error is +/-4.3 percentage points. This means that the poll results for both candidates differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
In general, however, don't have too much faith in the results of single polls, because they sometimes contain large errors. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, forecasting research recommends to rely on combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that draws upon forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
To make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, we translate them into two-party vote shares. This procedure yields figures of 65.9% for Clinton and 34.2% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
An average of recent polls in California has Clinton at 63.8% of the two-party vote. Compared to her numbers in the PPIC poll Clinton's poll average is 2.1 percentage points worse. This difference is within the poll's margin of error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll compared with PollyVote's prediction
The current PollyVote foresees Clinton to gain 62.7% of the two-party vote in California. This means that the PollyVote forecast is 3.2 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin reveals that this deviation is insignificant.
