New LA Times poll: Clinton and Trump neck-and-neck
By Results of a new national poll administered by LA Times were distributed. The poll asked interviewees for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
LA Times poll results
According to the results, 43.0% of interviewees will vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while 46.0% are going to vote for real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted between October 2 and October 8. The sample size was 2712 participants. If one accounts for the poll's margin of error of +/-4.5 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. As a result, a good strategy is to not have too much confidence in the results of a single poll. Rather than relying on results from single polls, one should rely on combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that uses forecasts from different methods, each of which uses different data.
In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, you can translate them into two-party vote shares. This procedure yields values of 48.3% for Clinton and 51.7% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
An average of recent polls has Trump at 47.5% of the two-party vote. This value is 4.2 percentage points lower than respective numbers in the LA Times poll. This deviation is within the poll's margin of error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll in comparison with PollyVote's prediction
The current PollyVote predicts Trump to gain 47.4% of the two-party vote. This means that the PollyVote forecast is 4.3 points below polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is thus within the poll's sampling error.
