Clinton holds negligible advantage in new Economist poll
By Economist published the results of a new national poll. In this poll, interviewees were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.
Economist poll results
The results show that 47.0% of respondents are going to cast a ballot for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, whereas 42.0% plan to vote for billionaire Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted from August 27 to August 29, among a random sample of 1119 participants. Given the poll's margin of error of +/-4.0 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Thus, as a general rule, a good strategy is to not focus too much on the results of an individual poll. At the very least, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
To make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, we translate them into shares of the two-party vote. The respective figures are 52.8% for Clinton and 47.2% for Trump.
Results in comparison to other polls
Clinton currently runs at 52.3% of the two-party vote according to an average of recent polls. In comparison to numbers in the Economist poll Clinton's poll average is 0.5 percentage points worse. This margin is within the poll's error margin, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll compared with PollyVote's forecast
The current PollyVote expects Clinton to gain 53.2% of the two-party vote. This means that Polly's forecast is 0.4 points above polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error reveals that this deviation is insignificant.
