Trump and Clinton virtually tied 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: Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton or Republican candidate Donald Trump.
LA Times poll results
According to the results, 42.0% of participants plan to vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whereas 45.0% plan to vote for real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out between August 27 and September 2. The sample size was 2576 participants. The sampling error is +/-4.5 percentage points, which means that the levels of voter support for the candidates of both parties do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
In general, however, you should not have too much faith in the results of single polls, because they often contain large errors. Instead of relying on results from single polls, we recommend to consult combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that relies on different methods and data.
To make the results comparable to forecasts from other methods, one can translate them into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure results in values of 48.3% for Clinton and 51.7% for Trump.
Results in comparison to other polls
If we look at an average of polls, Trump's current two-party vote share is at 47.7%. Compared to numbers in the LA Times poll Trump's poll average is 4 percentage points worse. This margin is within the poll's error margin, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote prediction
The current PollyVote forecasts Trump to gain 46.9% of the two-party vote. Hence, Polly's prediction is 4.8 points below polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's margin of error suggests that this deviation is significant.
