Latest OpinionWorks poll in Maryland: Trump trails by a huge margin
By On November 6, OpinionWorks released the results of a new poll, in which respondents from Maryland were asked for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
OpinionWorks poll results
According to the results, 54.0% of respondents would give their vote to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while 25.0% plan to vote for businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out between August 18 and August 30. The sample size was 754 likely voters. There is a sampling error of +/-3.6 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the gap between both candidates is statistically significant.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Hence, a good strategy is to not be too confident the results of an individual poll. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, the evidence-based approach is to look at combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that relies on different methods and data.
To make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, you can convert them into two-party vote shares. This yields figures of 68.4% for Clinton and 31.7% for Trump.
Results vs. other polls
Looking at an average of Maryland polls, Clinton's current two-party vote share is at 69.5%. In comparison to her numbers in the OpinionWorks poll Clinton's poll average is 1.1 percentage points higher. This deviation is within the poll's margin of error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The latest PollyVote forecasts Clinton to gain 66.0% of the two-party vote in Maryland. That is, the PollyVote forecast is 2.4 points below her polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is thus in line with the poll's sampling error.
