Clinton tied with Trump in new LA Times poll
By Results of a new national poll administered by LA Times were announced. The poll asked interviewees for whom they will vote: Donald·Trump or Hillary·Clinton.
LA Times poll results
The results show that the two candidates have the exact same level of support, each with 44.0% of the vote.
The poll was carried out from August 16 to August 22 among 2411 participants. The margin of error is +/-2.0 points, which means that the poll results for Trump and Clinton do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
In general, however, a good strategy is to not have too much faith in the results of single polls, as they sometimes contain large errors. At the very least, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
For the following comparison, we translate Clinton's and Trump's raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. The results of the actual poll mean 50.0 % for Clinton and 50.0 % for Trump concerning the two-party vote share. For comparison: Only 49.4% was gained by Clinton in the LA Times poll on August 22, for Trump this number was 50.6%.
Results vs. other polls
When compared to the average forecast of other polls Clinton performed 3.1 percentage points worse in the poll. This difference is outside the poll's margin of error, which suggests that the poll is an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The most recent PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 53.5% and Trump 46.5% of the two-party vote. Clinton has 3.5 percentage points less when the results of the poll are compared to the combined PollyVote forecast. The PollyVote forecast is thus outside the poll's margin of error.
