Emerson poll in Vermont: Clinton with 21 points lead
Emerson published the results of a new poll on November 5. In this poll, participants from Vermont were asked for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
Emerson poll results
Of those who responded, 47.0% said that they plan to vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, whereas 26.0% said that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted from September 2 to September 5, among a random sample of 600 likely voters. The sampling error is +/-3.9 percentage points. This means that the poll results 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, as they may incorporate large errors. Rather than relying on results from single polls, the best practice is to use combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that incorporates different methods and data.
For the following comparison, we translate Clinton's and Trump's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. The respective figures are 64.4% for Clinton and 35.6% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
Clinton currently achieves 68.6% of the two-party vote according to an average of recent polls in Vermont. This value is 4.2 percentage points higher than her corresponding numbers in the Emerson poll. This margin is outside the poll's margin of error, which means that the poll is an outlier.
The poll compared with PollyVote's prediction
The most recent PollyVote forecasts Clinton to gain 67.5% of the two-party vote in Vermont. That is, the combined PollyVote is 3.1 points above her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error reveals that this deviation is insignificant.