Latest Economist poll: Clinton and Trump in a tossup

Economist released the results of a new national poll, in which respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton.

The poll was carried out from August 19 to August 23 with 906 respondents. The sampling error is +/-4.1 percentage points, which means that the levels of voter support for the two candidates do not differ significantly.

Putting the results in context

In general, however, one should not have too much faith in the results of single polls, as they can incorporate large errors. At least, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.

For the following analysis, we convert Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. This yields figures of 51.7% for Clinton and 48.4% for Trump.

Results in comparison to other polls

Clinton can currently count on 53.3% of the two-party vote according to an average of recent polls. Clinton currently achieves 53.3% of the two-party vote in an average of recent polls. Relative to numbers in the Economist poll Clinton's poll average is 1.6 percentage points higher. This deviation is within the poll's margin of error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.

Comparison to the combined PollyVote

The current PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 53.4% of the two-party vote. Hence, the PollyVote forecast is 1.7 points above polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin reveals that this difference is negligible.

This article was automatically generated by the PollyBot, which uses algorithms developed by AX Semantics to generate text from data stored in our API. The exact dataset underlying this particular article can be found here.

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