Small advantage for Trump in latest LA Times poll
By LA Times published the results of a new national poll. In this poll, respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton.
LA Times poll results
Of those who answered the question, 43.0% said that they intend to vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while 47.0% said that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out between September 29 and October 5. The sample size was 2489 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 can include large biases, which is why they should be treated with caution. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, the best practice scientific advice is to look at combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that relies on forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
In order to make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, you can convert them into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure yields values of 47.8% for Clinton and 52.2% for Trump.
Results vs. other polls
Trump currently achieves 47.4% of the major two-party vote according to an average of recent polls. Relative to numbers in the LA Times poll Trump's poll average is 4.8 percentage points lower. This difference is outside the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote prediction
The most recent PollyVote anticipates Trump to gain 47.3% of the two-party vote. Hence, the PollyVote is 4.9 points below polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error suggests that this difference is significant.
