New Economist poll: Clinton and Trump in a tossup
By Economist published the results of a new national poll. In this poll, participants were asked for whom they will vote: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
Economist poll results
Of those who responded, 47.0% said that they plan to vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, while 44.0% indicated that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out from August 19 to August 23 among 906 participants. Taking into account the poll's margin of error of +/-4.1 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Hence, one should not put too much trust in the results of an individual poll. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, the evidence-based approach is to rely on combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that includes different methods and data.
For the following analysis, we convert Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. This procedure yields values of 51.7% for Clinton and 48.4% for Trump. On August 26 Clinton received only 48.4% in the Economist poll and Trump received only 0.0%.
Comparison to other polls
An average of recent polls sees Clinton at 53.2% of the two-party vote. This value is 1.5 percentage points higher than respective numbers in the Economist poll. This margin is within the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote forecast
The latest PollyVote foresees Clinton to gain 53.7% of the two-party vote. Hence, Polly's prediction is 2.0 points above polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is thus in line with the poll's margin of error.
