Latest LA Times poll: Trump holds slight lead
By LA Times published the results of a new national poll. In this poll, participants were asked for whom they will vote: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
LA Times poll results
Of those who responded, 43.0% said that they intend to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, while 47.0% revealed that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out between October 24 and October 30. The sample size was 3237 participants. The error margin is +/-4.5 points. This means that the poll results for Trump and Clinton do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
Single polls can include substantial biases, and should be treated with caution. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, one should use combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that draws upon different methods and data.
To make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, you can translate them into two-party vote shares. The respective figures are 47.8% for Clinton and 52.2% for Trump. To compare: 50.0% was obtained by Clinton in the LA Times poll on October 26, for Trump this result was only 50.0%.
Comparison to other polls
An average of recent polls has Trump at 47.1% of the two-party vote. This value is 5.1 percentage points lower than respective numbers in the LA Times poll. This margin is outside the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The latest PollyVote predicts Trump to gain 46.5% of the two-party vote. This means that the PollyVote forecast is 5.7 points below polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error shows that this deviation is significant.
