Clinton and Trump neck-and-neck in latest Economist poll
By Economist published the results of a new national poll. In this poll, respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
Economist poll results
According to the results, 46.0% of respondents intend to cast a ballot for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whereas 44.0% plan to vote for businessman Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted from September 10 to September 13, among a random sample of 926 participants. The error margin is +/-4.0 points, which means that the levels of voter support for the two candidates do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Therefore, as a general rule, you should not focus too much on the results of a single poll. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, the best practice is to rely on combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that draws upon different methods and data.
To make the results comparable to forecasts from other methods, you can convert them into shares of the two-party vote. The respective figures are 51.1% for Clinton and 48.9% for Trump. For comparison: Only 47.2% was obtained by Clinton in the Economist poll on September 4, for Trump this number was only 0.0%.
Comparison to other polls
An average of recent polls has Clinton at 51.6% of the two-party vote. This value is 0.5 percentage points higher than respective numbers in the Economist poll. This margin is within the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The latest PollyVote anticipates Clinton to gain 53.0% of the two-party vote. Hence, the combined PollyVote is 1.9 points above polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's margin of error suggests that this deviation is negligible.
