Ohio: New Quinnipiac poll shows Clinton with 4 points lead
By Quinnipiac published the results of a new poll. In this poll, interviewees from Ohio were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.
In Ohio, the popular vote is usually decided by a narrow margin. This is the reason why the state is commonly viewed as a swing state, which makes it particularly interesting from a forecasting perspective.
Quinnipiac poll results
Of those who answered the question, 49.0% said that they are going to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, while 45.0% said that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out from July 30 to August 7 among 812 likely voters. If one accounts for the poll's margin of error of +/-3.4 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. In general, don't put too much trust in the results of an individual poll. Rather than relying on results from single polls, the best practice scientific advice is to rely on combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that includes different methods and data.
In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, we translate them into two-party vote shares. This yields figures of 52.1% for Clinton and 47.9% for Trump.
Results vs. other polls
An average of recent polls in Ohio sees Clinton at 51.5% of the two-party vote. Relative to her numbers in the Quinnipiac poll Clinton's poll average is 0.6 percentage points worse. This margin is within the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote forecast
The current PollyVote anticipates Clinton to gain 51.0% of the two-party vote in Ohio. This means that the PollyVote is 1.1 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error shows that this difference is negligible.
