Las Vegas Review-Journal*LVRJ* poll in Nevada: Trump trails by a clear margin
Las Vegas Review-JournalLVRJ published the results of a new poll. In this poll, respondents from Nevada were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.
Nevada is traditionally a battleground state, where the GOP and the Democrats have historically won similar voter support. This is the reason why the election outcome here is considered important in determining who will win the majority of electoral votes.
Las Vegas Review-JournalLVRJ poll results
Of those who answered the question, 48.0% said that they intend to vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whereas 41.0% declared that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted from October 20 to October 23, among a random sample of 800 likely voters. Considering the poll's error margin of +/-3.9 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
In general, however, a good strategy is to not have too much faith in the results of single polls, as they may incorporate large errors. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, forecasting research recommends to rely on combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that includes forecasts from different methods, each of which includes different data.
For the following comparison, we convert the candidates' raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. This procedure yields figures of 53.9% for Clinton and 46.1% for Trump.
Results in comparison to other polls
An average of recent polls in Nevada has Clinton at 52.8% of the two-party vote. This value is 1.1 percentage points lower than her corresponding numbers in the Las Vegas Review-JournalLVRJ poll. This difference is within the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The current PollyVote forecasts Clinton to gain 52.4% of the two-party vote in Nevada. Hence, the PollyVote is 1.5 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin reveals that this difference is insignificant.