Tossup between Trump and Clinton in latest Economist poll

Results of a new national poll administered by Economist were distributed. The poll asked participants for whom they will vote: Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.

The results show that 47.0% of interviewees are going to vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, while 44.0% are going to vote for billionaire Donald Trump.

This poll was conducted from August 19 to August 23, among a random sample of 906 participants. The error margin is +/-4.1 percentage points, which means that the poll results for the two candidates do not differ significantly.

Putting the results in context

As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Hence, one should not be overly confident the results of a single poll. Rather, one should examine 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 corresponding figures are 51.7% for Clinton and 48.4% for Trump.

Results vs. other polls

Looking at an average of polls, Clinton's current two-party vote share is at 53.3%. This value is 1.6 percentage points higher than corresponding numbers in the Economist poll. This difference is within the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is not an outlier.

Results compared to the combined PollyVote forecast

The current PollyVote anticipates Clinton to gain 53.7% of the two-party vote. That is, Polly's prediction is 2.0 points above polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error shows that this deviation is insignificant.

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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