New NBC-WSJ-Marist poll in Ohio: Trump trails by a slim margin

NBC-WSJ-Marist published the results of a new poll. In this poll, participants from Ohio were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton or Republican candidate Donald Trump.

Historically, Ohio has been a swing state, in which neither of the two major parties has had overwhelming support to clinch its electoral college votes. Hence, predictions in this state are of particular value.

Of those who answered the question, 43.0% said that they intend to vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, while 38.0% said that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.

The poll was carried out from August 3 to August 7 among 889 registered voters. Considering the poll's error margin of +/-3.3 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.

Putting the results in context

Individual polls should be interpreted with caution, as they often include substantial biases. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, you should use combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that incorporates different methods and data.

To make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, we translate them into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure results in figures of 53.1% for Clinton and 46.9% for Trump. On August 1 Clinton received only 50.0% in the NBC-WSJ-Marist poll and Trump received 50.0%.

Comparison to other polls

If we look at an average of Ohio polls, Clinton's two-party vote share is currently at 51.5%. In comparison to her numbers in the NBC-WSJ-Marist poll Clinton's poll average is 1.6 percentage points worse. This difference is within the poll's margin of error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.

Results compared to the combined PollyVote prediction

The most recent PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 51.0% of the two-party vote in Ohio. This means that Polly's forecast is 2.1 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error reveals that this difference is negligible.

This article was automatically generated by the PollyBot, which uses algorithms developed by AX Semantics to generate text from data stored in our API. The exact dataset underlying this particular article can be found here.

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