5 points lead for Clinton in latest Economist poll
By Results of a new national poll carried out by Economist were spread. The poll asked participants for whom they will vote: Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton or Republican candidate Donald Trump.
Economist poll results
Of those who answered the question, 47.0% said that they will vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while 42.0% indicated that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was in the field between August 27 and August 29. The sample size was 1119 participants. The sampling error is +/-4.0 points. This means that the poll results for both candidates do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Therefore, as a general rule, one should not have too much confidence in the results of an individual poll. At least, one should examine how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
For the following comparison, we convert Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. The corresponding figures are 52.8% for Clinton and 47.2% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
Clinton currently runs at 52.3% of the major two-party vote according to an average of recent polls. This value is 0.5 percentage points lower than corresponding numbers in the Economist poll. This difference is within the poll's margin of error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote prediction
The current PollyVote foresees Clinton to gain 52.9% of the two-party vote. Hence, Polly's combined forecast is 0.1 points above polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin reveals that this deviation is negligible.
