Virtual tie between Trump and Clinton in latest LA Times poll
By LA Times released the results of a new national poll, in which respondents 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 are going to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, while 45.0% indicated that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted from October 14 to October 20, among a random sample of 3001 participants. The margin of error is +/-4.5 percentage points, which means that the poll results for the Democratic and the Republican candidate do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
In general, however, a good strategy is to not have too much faith in the results of single polls, because they may contain large errors. Instead of relying on results from single polls, forecasting research recommends to rely on combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that relies on forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
For the following analysis, we convert Clinton's and Trump's raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. This yields figures of 49.4% for Clinton and 50.6% for Trump. On October 18 Clinton received 50.0% in the LA Times poll and Trump received only 50.0%.
Comparison to other polls
Trump currently achieves 46.6% of the two-party vote according to an average of recent polls. This value is 4 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 latest PollyVote foresees Trump to gain 46.0% of the two-party vote. Hence, Polly's combined forecast is 4.6 points below polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is therefore outside the poll's error margin.
