Clinton and Trump virtually tied in new Economist poll

Economist 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.

Of those who answered the question, 47.0% said that they intend to vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, while 44.0% declared that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.

The poll was carried out from August 19 to August 23 with 906 participants. The error margin is +/-4.1 points. This means that the poll results for the candidates of both parties do not differ significantly.

Putting the results in context

Single polls may incorporate substantial biases, and should be treated with caution. Rather, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.

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

Results in comparison to other polls

If we look at an average of polls, Clinton's current two-party vote share is at 53.2%. Relative to numbers in the Economist poll Clinton's poll average is 1.5 percentage points better. This margin is within the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.

Results compared to the combined PollyVote prediction

The most recent PollyVote forecasts Clinton to gain 53.7% of the two-party vote. This means that the combined PollyVote is 2.0 points above polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin suggests that this difference is negligible.

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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