Ohio: Clinton with small lead in latest Quinnipiac poll

Quinnipiac released the results of a new poll, in which respondents from Ohio were asked for whom they will vote: Republican nominee Donald Trump or Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton.

Ohio is traditionally a swing state, where the Republican and Democratic candidates have historically won similar voter support. Hence, the election outcome in that state is viewed as critical in determining the overall result of the presidential election.

Of those who replied, 49.0% said that they would vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, while 45.0% declared that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.

This poll was conducted from July 30 to August 7, among a random sample of 812 likely voters. The sampling error is +/-3.4 percentage points, which means that the poll results for Clinton and Trump do not differ significantly.

Putting the results in context

As a general rule, however, don't have too much faith in the results of single polls, because they often incorporate large errors. Instead of relying on results from single polls, research in forecasting recommends to rely on combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that relies on different methods and data.

To make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, one can translate them into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure results in figures of 52.1% for Clinton and 47.9% for Trump. On August 1 Clinton obtained only 50.0% in the Quinnipiac poll and Trump obtained 50.0%.

Results compared to other polls

An average of recent polls in Ohio sees Clinton at 51.5% of the two-party vote. This value is 0.6 percentage points lower than her respective numbers in the Quinnipiac poll. This margin is within the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.

The poll compared with PollyVote's forecast

The latest PollyVote expects Clinton to gain 51.0% of the two-party vote in Ohio. That is, Polly's combined forecast is 1.1 points below her polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is thus in line with the poll's margin of error.

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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