Latest Economist poll: Clinton and Trump in a virtual tie
By Economist published the results of a new national poll. In this poll, respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Republican nominee Donald Trump or Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton.
Economist poll results
This poll was conducted from August 19 to August 23, among a random sample of 906 participants. Considering the poll's sampling error of +/-4.1 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
Individual polls should be interpreted with caution, because they can contain large biases. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, the evidence-based approach is to use combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that relies on different methods and data.
In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from other methods, we translate them into shares of the two-party vote. This yields figures of 51.7% for Clinton and 48.4% for Trump. To compare: 53.4% was gained by Clinton in the Economist poll on August 23, for Trump this result was only 46.6%.
Comparison to other polls
Clinton currently achieves 53.1% of the major two-party vote according to an average of recent polls. Compared to numbers in the Economist poll Clinton's poll average is 1.4 percentage points better. This deviation is within the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll in comparison with PollyVote's prediction
The most recent PollyVote forecasts Clinton to gain 53.5% of the two-party vote. That is, Polly's prediction is 1.8 points above polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is therefore in line with the poll's margin of error.
