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Political polling may be best known for indicating who’s ahead and who’s behind, but The New York Times/Portland Press Herald/Siena poll released Monday contains much more granular information for anyone who dives into the numbers.

The poll — the first in a collaboration between the Portland Press Herald and the Times/Siena poll — asked Mainers about President Donald Trump, the issues driving their preferences in key races and more. In addition to the Press Herald’s coverage of the findings, tables of the results are available for readers to explore.

Here’s a rundown of how the survey came together and how to understand it.

How was the poll conducted?

Interviewers made calls to 608 likely Maine voters from a specialized database and asked a series of precisely worded questions to ascertain their backgrounds, whom they plan to vote for and their attitudes toward a variety of topics. The poll included Mainers across many demographic groups, political parties and parts of the state.

The Times/Siena poll uses phone calls, a traditional survey method, rather than text messages or online forms. Among the respondents in this poll, 93% were reached on a cellphone.

Pollsters do not contact every voter to assess the attitudes of the likely electorate, which may include you. Polls rely on a sample, which can say a lot about the whole population if it’s big enough and similar enough to the population — and if respondents’ answers are specially compiled.

How does the sample reflect the electorate?

The results do not take the poll respondents’ combined responses at face value. Instead, they are given different weights to make the sample of Maine voters — a tiny fraction of the total electorate — mirror the population likely to cast ballots in November’s general election.

The weighting takes account of how likely a person is to vote in the election, drawing on data about when they have previously voted and on their own stated plans. It also adjusts the results to match the proportion of likely voters of different genders, age groups, education levels and other characteristics.

The poll’s models assign each respondent a value for how much their responses will factor into the final numbers. Someone in a demographic group that was underrepresented in the survey relative to the entire likely Maine electorate would play a larger role in the combined results.

How do I read the tables of results?

The columns on the far left tell you what questions were asked, in order, to each voter. The next column on the left tells you how the full survey group responded. For example, a question around the middle of the survey addresses the state of Maine’s economy. Just 2% of likely voters think economic conditions in the state are “excellent,” according to the poll, while 34% think they are “poor” and many others fall in between.

The full tables, called cross-tabs, break down how members of various demographic groups answered the questions. They can provide insights into which Mainers make up a candidate’s base of support. In the Senate race, for instance, Republican Sen. Susan Collins leads Democratic nominee Graham Platner among men, 52% to 45%, while Platner is the preference of more women, 52% to Collins’ 44%.

But be careful when interpreting cross-tabs: Look at the number of respondents who fall into a given category (listed below the percentages), and if it’s less than about 150, they constitute a much less reliable indicator of how the whole population in that category feels. The more voters represented in a given sample, the more confident we can be about the statistic.

How accurate are these results?

There are many reasons why a poll cannot capture the views of all likely voters in Maine. While the polling process accounts for many known biases and potential errors, the results nonetheless come with a margin of error — the range within which the population’s actual attitudes are very likely to fall.

For this poll’s full sample, including the attention-grabbing percentages for Collins and Platner, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4.8 percentage points. (That accounts only for any error stemming from taking a sample of the entire likely electorate.) Compare that to the small apparent gap between the Senate candidates, and it’s a dead heat in June.

The New York Times/Portland Press Herald/Siena poll of Maine voters was funded with support from the Maine Trust for Local News.