Tossup between Clinton and Trump in new LA Times poll
By LA Times published the results of a new national poll. In this poll, interviewees were asked for whom they will vote: Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton.
LA Times poll results
Of those who responded, 44.0% said that they intend to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whereas 45.0% said that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted between October 9 and October 15. The sample size was 2946 participants. The margin of error is +/-4.5 percentage points, which means that the poll results for Trump and Clinton do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
Individual polls often contain large biases, and should be interpreted with caution. At least, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
For the following comparison, we translate the candidates' raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. This yields figures of 49.4% for Clinton and 50.6% for Trump. For comparison: Only 48.9% was gained by Clinton in the LA Times poll on October 10, for Trump this result was 51.1%.
Comparison to other polls
An average of recent polls has Trump at 46.3% of the two-party vote. Relative to numbers in the LA Times poll Trump's poll average is 4.3 percentage points worse. This deviation is within the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll compared with PollyVote's forecast
The current PollyVote forecasts Trump to gain 46.1% of the two-party vote. This means that the PollyVote is 4.5 points below polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is therefore within the poll's error margin.
