Ohio: Clinton tied with Trump in new PPP (D) poll
By PPP (D) published the results of a new poll. In this poll, interviewees from Ohio were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton or Republican candidate Donald Trump.
In Ohio, the election outcome is often 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.
PPP (D) poll results
According to the results, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and businessman Donald Trump are on equal standing, each with 45.0% of the vote.
The poll was carried out between July 22 and July 24. The sample size was 1334 registered voters. There is a sampling error of +/-2.7 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the race is currently a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. As a result, you should not have too much faith in the results of a single poll. At the very least, one should examine how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
For the following comparison, we convert Clinton's and Trump's raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. The results of the actual poll mean 50.0 % for Clinton and 50.0 % for Trump concerning the two-party vote share.
Results in comparison to other polls
In comparison to the average forecast of other polls Clinton performed 1.5 percentage points worse in the poll. This margin is outside the poll's error margin, which suggests that the poll is an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The most recent PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 51.9% and Trump 48.1% of the two-party vote in Ohio. Clinton has 1.9 percentage points less 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.
