Ohio: New NBC-WSJ-Marist poll shows Trump trailing by 5 points
By NBC-WSJ-Marist released the results of a new poll, in which respondents from Ohio were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.
In Ohio, the election outcome is usually decided by a narrow margin. This is why the state is commonly viewed as a battleground state, which makes it particularly interesting from a forecasting perspective.
NBC-WSJ-Marist poll results
Of those who replied, 43.0% said that they intend to vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whereas 38.0% revealed that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out from August 3 to August 7 with 889 registered voters. Considering the poll's margin of error of +/-3.3 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Therefore, as a general rule, one should not be overly confident the results of an individual poll. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, you should use combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that relies on different methods and data.
For the following analysis, we convert Clinton's and Trump's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. The resulting figures are 53.1% for Clinton and 46.9% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
Clinton is currently at 51.5% of the major two-party vote in an average of recent polls in Ohio. This value is 1.6 percentage points lower than her respective numbers in the NBC-WSJ-Marist poll. This margin is within the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll in comparison with PollyVote's prediction
The most recent PollyVote expects Clinton to gain 51.0% of the two-party vote in Ohio. That is, Polly's forecast is 2.1 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin suggests that this difference is negligible.
