Clinton tied with Trump in new LA Times poll
By LA Times released the results of a new national poll, in which respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Republican nominee Donald Trump or Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton.
LA Times poll results
According to the results, both candidates have the same level of support, each with 44.0% of the vote.
The poll was carried out from August 21 to August 27 among 2460 participants. The error margin is +/-4.5 percentage points, which means that the levels of voter support for Trump and Clinton do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Therefore, as a general rule, you should not be too confident the results of an individual poll. Rather than relying on results from single polls, forecasting research recommends to look at combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that includes forecasts from different methods, each of which includes different data.
For the following analysis, we translate Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. The results of the actual poll mean 50.0 % for Clinton and 50.0 % for Trump for the two-party vote share.
Comparison to other polls
Looking at an average of polls, Clinton's two-party vote share is currently at 53.2%. In comparison to the average forecast of other polls Clinton performed 3.2 percentage points worse in the poll. This margin is outside the poll's error margin, which suggests that the poll is an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The most recent PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 53.7% and Trump 46.3% of the two-party vote. Clinton has 3.7 percentage points less when the results of the poll are compared to the combined PollyVote forecast. The PollyVote forecast is thus outside the poll's margin of error.
