Economist poll: Trump trails by 5 points
By Economist published the results of a new national poll on August 1. In this poll, interviewees were asked for whom they will vote: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
Economist poll results
Of those who answered the question, 47.0% said that they would vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whereas 42.0% indicated that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from July 23 to July 24 among 1057 participants. Considering the poll's margin of error of +/-4.5 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
Individual polls should be interpreted with caution, because they may incorporate substantial biases. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, one should use combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that includes forecasts from different methods, each of which includes different data.
For the following comparison, we convert Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. The resulting figures are 52.8% for Clinton and 47.2% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
An average of recent polls sees Clinton at 51.6% of the two-party vote. Compared to her numbers in the Economist poll Clinton's poll average is 1.2 percentage points worse. This margin is within the poll's error margin, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll in comparison with PollyVote's prediction
The current PollyVote forecasts Clinton to gain 52.0% of the two-party vote. Hence, the PollyVote forecast is 0.8 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin reveals that this deviation is insignificant.
