Latest LA Times poll: Clinton and Trump neck-and-neck
By LA Times published the results of a new national poll. In this poll, interviewees were asked for whom they will vote: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
LA Times poll results
According to the results, 43.0% of respondents indicated that they would give their vote to former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, while 45.0% plan to vote for businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from September 17 to September 23 with 2559 respondents. The margin of error is +/-4.5 percentage points. This means that the poll results for Trump and Clinton do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Thus, as a general rule, you should not have too much faith in the results of a single poll. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, research in forecasting recommends to look at combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that relies on different methods and data.
In order to make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, one can convert them into two-party vote shares. This yields figures of 48.9% for Clinton and 51.1% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
An average of recent polls sees Trump at 48.3% of the two-party vote. This value is 2.8 percentage points lower than respective numbers in the LA Times poll. This margin is within the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote forecast
The current PollyVote expects Trump to gain 47.6% of the two-party vote. This means that Polly's prediction is 3.5 points below polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error indicates that this difference is insignificant.
