LA Times poll: Clinton trails by a narrow margin
By Results of a new national poll conducted by LA Times were circulated on July 30. The poll asked interviewees for whom they will vote: Donald·Trump or Hillary·Clinton.
LA Times poll results
According to the results, 42.0% of participants are going to give their vote to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while 47.0% plan to vote for billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from July 23 to July 29. A total of 2188 respondents responded. There is a sampling error of +/-2.1 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the gap between both candidates is statistically significant.
Putting the results in context
Individual polls can contain large biases, which is why they should be interpreted with caution. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, research in forecasting recommends to look at combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that uses forecasts from different methods, each of which uses different data.
For the following analysis, we translate Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. The corresponding figures are 47.2% for Clinton and 52.8% for Trump. On July 27 Clinton received only 46.0% in the LA Times poll and Trump received 54.0%.
Comparison to other polls
Trump is currently at 48.6% of the major two-party vote according to an average of recent polls. Relative to his numbers in the LA Times poll Trump's poll average is 4.2 percentage points worse. This difference is outside the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote forecast
The current PollyVote anticipates Trump to gain 48.0% of the two-party vote. That is, the PollyVote is 4.8 points below his polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error indicates that this difference is significant.
