Trump and Clinton neck-and-neck in new Economist poll

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

The poll was conducted from August 19 to August 23 with 906 participants. If one takes into account the poll's sampling error of +/-4.1 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.

Putting the results in context

In general, however, you should not have too much faith in the results of single polls, because they can contain large errors. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, research in forecasting recommends to consult combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that incorporates different methods and data.

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

Comparison to other polls

An average of recent polls sees Clinton at 53.1% of the two-party vote. Looking at an average of polls, Clinton's current two-party vote share is at 53.1%. This value is 1.4 percentage points higher than corresponding numbers in the Economist poll. This difference is within the poll's margin of error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.

The poll compared with PollyVote's prediction

The latest PollyVote anticipates Clinton to gain 53.6% of the two-party vote. That is, the PollyVote is 1.9 points above polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is thus in line with the poll's error margin.

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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