Clinton tied with Trump in new LA Times poll
By Results of a new national poll administered by LA Times were published. The poll asked interviewees for whom they will vote: Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton or Republican candidate Donald Trump.
LA Times poll results
The results show that the two candidates are on equal standing, each with 44.0% of the vote.
This poll was conducted from August 30 to September 5, among a random sample of 2605 participants. There is a sampling error of +/-4.5 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the race is currently a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
Individual polls should be interpreted with caution, since they can contain large errors. Instead of relying on results from single polls, the recommended strategy use combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that uses forecasts from different methods, each of which uses different data.
For the following comparison, we translate the candidates' raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. The results of the actual poll mean 50.0 % for Clinton and 50.0 % for Trump for the two-party vote share.
Comparison to other polls
Looking at an average of polls, Clinton's current two-party vote share is at 52.1%. In comparison to the average forecast of other polls Clinton performed 2.1 percentage points worse in the poll. This margin is outside the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is an outlier.
The poll compared with PollyVote's forecast
The most recent PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 52.5% and Trump 47.5% of the two-party vote. Clinton has 2.5 percentage points less when the results of the poll are compared to the combined PollyVote forecast. The PollyVote forecast is thus outside the poll's margin of error.
