LA Times poll: Trump with 4 points lead
By LA Times published the results of a new national poll. In this poll, interviewees were asked for whom they will vote: Republican nominee Donald Trump or Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton.
LA Times poll results
According to the results, 42.0% of interviewees indicated that they would cast a ballot for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whereas 46.0% indicated that they would cast a ballot for businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out from September 14 to September 20 among 2629 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, as they can contain large biases. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, the best practice is to rely on combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that incorporates different methods and data.
For the following comparison, we convert Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. This procedure yields figures of 47.7% for Clinton and 52.3% for Trump. For comparison: Only 47.2% was obtained by Clinton in the LA Times poll on September 19, for Trump this number was 52.8%.
Comparison to other polls
Looking at an average of polls, Trump's two-party vote share is currently at 48.8%. This value is 3.5 percentage points lower than corresponding numbers in the LA Times poll. This deviation is within the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The most recent PollyVote anticipates Trump to gain 47.3% of the two-party vote. That is, Polly's forecast is 5.0 points below polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error reveals that this deviation is significant.
