Illinois: New Loras poll has Trump behind by 11 points
Results of a new poll conducted by Loras were distributed. The poll asked participants from Illinois for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
Loras poll results
Of those who responded, 45.0% said that they will vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, while 34.0% indicated that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out from October 26 to October 27 among 600 likely voters. The margin of error is +/-4.0 percentage points, which means that the levels of voter support for Trump and Clinton differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
In general, however, you should not have too much faith in the results of single polls, since they sometimes incorporate large errors. Rather, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
For the following analysis, we convert Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. This procedure yields figures of 57.0% for Clinton and 43.0% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
If we look at an average of Illinois polls, Clinton's current two-party vote share is at 59.5%. Compared to her numbers in the Loras poll Clinton's poll average is 2.5 percentage points higher. This deviation is within the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote prediction
The most recent PollyVote foresees Clinton to gain 59.4% of the two-party vote in Illinois. Hence, the PollyVote is 2.4 points above her polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is therefore within the poll's sampling error.