Ohio: Clinton tied with Trump in new SuffolkSuffolk poll
By Results of a new poll carried out by SuffolkSuffolk were announced. The poll asked participants from Ohio for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
In Ohio, the election outcome is usually decided by a narrow margin. This is why the state is commonly referred to as a swing state, which makes it particularly interesting from a forecasting perspective.
SuffolkSuffolk poll results
The results show that real estate developer Donald Trump and former New York Senator Hillary Clinton have the same level of support, each with 44.0% of the vote.
The poll was conducted from July 18 to July 20. A total of 500 likely voters responded. There is a sampling error of +/-4.4 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the race is currently a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
In general, however, one should not have too much faith in the results of single polls, since they often incorporate large errors. Rather than relying on results from single polls, forecasting research recommends to look at combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that incorporates forecasts from different methods, each of which incorporates different data.
In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from other methods, one can convert them into two-party vote shares. The results of the actual poll mean 50.0 % for Clinton and 50.0 % for Trump for the two-party vote share.
The poll in comparison with PollyVote's forecast
The most recent PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 50.7% and Trump 49.3% of the two-party vote in Ohio. Clinton has 0.7 percentage points less and Trump has 0.7 percentage points more when the results of the poll are compared to the combined PollyVote forecast for Ohio. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error suggests that this deviation is significant.
