Poll: Trump Leads Clinton By Six Points

Donald Trump just beat Hillary Clinton by six points in a national poll, potentially putting an end to her winning streak.

The USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll found Trump in the lead, with 47.8 percent to Clinton’s 41.1 percent when registered voters ranked their likelihood to vote for either candidate, as of Sept. 19.

Despite the majority of respondents selecting Trump as their preferred candidate, 49.5 percent predicted that Clinton would win the presidency, while 45.1 said Trump would take the Oval Office.

In an election where both candidates have the lowest favorability ratings of any other major party nominee in the history of the polls, turnout is of utmost importance, and results were almost dead even — 83 percent of likely Trump voters and 82.7 percent of likely Clinton voters said that they will cast their ballots on Nov. 8.

While the poll may be good news for Trump supporters, political statistician Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight points out that the particular poll has a tendency to be an outlier in Trump’s favor.

One reason why it tends to skew to the right, Silver said, is that it is weighted based on how people said they voted in 2012 — a notoriously unreliable measurement.

“That’s probably a mistake, because people often misstate or misremember their vote from previous elections,” Silver explained in a write-up on his site.

His recommendation is that poll-watchers view each survey, including this one, in the context of national averages — in which Clinton is leading by 0.9 points, according to Real Clear Politics — as people have a tendency to pick apart outliers that do not favor their candidates.

“You can almost always find something ‘wrong’ with a poll you don’t like, even if you might have approved of its methodology before you saw its result,” he added.

Sources: LA Times Poll Dashboard, FiveThirtyEight, Real Clear Politics / Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore/Flickr