Ohio: Clinton tied with Trump in new Suffolk University poll

Suffolk University 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.

Historically, Ohio has been a swing state, in which no single party has had overwhelming support to secure its electoral college votes. This is why forecasts here are of particular interest.

The results show that billionaire Donald Trump and former First Lady Hillary Clinton can draw on equal levels of support, each with 44.0% of the vote.

The poll was conducted from July 18 to July 20 with 500 likely voters. The error margin is +/-4.4 points, which means that the levels of voter support for Trump and Clinton do not differ significantly.

Putting the results in context

As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Hence, a good strategy is to not be too confident the results of an individual poll. Instead of relying on results from single polls, the evidence-based approach is to consult combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that uses forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.

In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from other methods, one can convert them into shares of the two-party vote. The results of the actual poll mean 50.0 % for Clinton and 50.0 % for Trump for the two-party vote share.

Results in comparison to other polls

When compared to the average results of other polls Clinton performed worse with 1.5 percentage points, while Trump did better with 1.5 percentage points. This margin is outside the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is an outlier.

The poll in comparison with PollyVote's forecast

The most recent PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 51.0% and Trump 49.0% of the two-party vote in Ohio. Clinton has 1.0 percentage points less and Trump has 1.0 percentage points more when the results of the poll are compared to the combined PollyVote forecast for Ohio. The PollyVote forecast is thus outside the poll's error margin.

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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