538 (polls-plus) model: Trump trails by a small margin

The 538 (polls-plus) model provided an updated prediction of the election outcome. The model currently forecasts a major vote share of 52.3% for Clinton, and 47.7% for Trump. In comparison, on August 29 Trump was still predicted to win 47.8% of the vote.

Putting the results in context

In general, however, a good strategy is to not have too much faith in the results of single models, because they sometimes contain large errors. Instead of relying on results from single models, the best practice is to rely on combined models or, even better, a combined forecast that uses forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.

Results vs. other econometric models

An average of recent econometric models has Clinton at 49.2% of the two-party vote. Relative to numbers in the 538 (polls-plus) model Clinton's econometric model average is 3.1 percentage points worse.

Comparison to the combined PollyVote

The most recent PollyVote anticipates Clinton to gain 53.7% of the two-party vote. The results of the 538 (polls-plus) model for Clinton are thus 1.4 percentage points below the combined PollyVote.

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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