Trump and Clinton virtually tied in new Economist poll
By Economist released the results of a new national poll, in which respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
Economist poll results
Of those who replied, 45.0% said that they are going to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whereas 44.0% declared that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted from September 18 to September 19, among a random sample of 936 participants. The error margin is +/-4.0 points, which means that the poll results for the two candidates do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
Individual polls often incorporate large biases, and should be interpreted with caution. At the very least, one should examine how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
To make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, we convert them into shares of the two-party vote. This yields figures of 50.6% for Clinton and 49.4% for Trump. To compare: Only 47.2% was gained by Clinton in the Economist poll on August 29, for Trump this result was only 0.0%.
Results compared to other polls
Clinton currently runs at 51.4% of the two-party vote in an average of recent polls. This value is 0.8 percentage points higher than respective numbers in the Economist poll. This deviation is within the poll's margin of error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The latest PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 52.7% of the two-party vote. This means that Polly's prediction is 2.1 points above polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's margin of error shows that this deviation is negligible.
