New Economist poll: Trump trails by a narrow margin
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
The results show that 47.0% of participants are going to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whereas 42.0% would vote for real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was in the field between August 27 and August 29. The sample size was 1119 participants. There is a sampling error of +/-4.0 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the race is currently a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Therefore, as a general rule, don't have too much confidence in the results of an individual poll. Instead of relying on results from single polls, research in forecasting recommends to rely on combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that uses different methods and data.
For the following comparison, we convert Clinton's and Trump's raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. The resulting figures are 52.8% for Clinton and 47.2% for Trump.
Results in comparison to other polls
Clinton can currently count on 52.8% of the major two-party vote according to an average of recent polls. In comparison to numbers in the Economist poll Clinton's poll average is 0 percentage points better. This difference is within the poll's margin of error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The latest PollyVote foresees Clinton to gain 53.6% of the two-party vote. This means that Polly's forecast is 0.8 points above polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error indicates that this deviation is insignificant.
