Ohio: Clinton holds negligible lead in new Quinnipiac poll
By Quinnipiac 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.
Historically, Ohio has been a swing state, in which neither of the two major parties has had overwhelming support to clinch its electoral college votes. This is why forecasts here are of particular interest.
Quinnipiac poll results
According to the results, 49.0% of interviewees said that they intend to vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while 45.0% intend to vote for billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was in the field between July 30 and August 7. The sample size was 812 likely voters. The margin of error is +/-3.4 percentage points, which means that the poll results for Trump and Clinton do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
Individual polls can incorporate large biases, and should be interpreted with caution. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, one should use combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that relies on forecasts from different methods, each of which relies on different data.
For the following comparison, we convert Clinton's and Trump's raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. This procedure results in values of 52.1% for Clinton and 47.9% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
Clinton can currently count on 52.8% of the two-party vote according to an average of recent polls in Ohio. In comparison to her numbers in the Quinnipiac poll Clinton's poll average is 0.7 percentage points higher. This difference is within the poll's margin of error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier. The current PollyVote expects Clinton to gain 52.1% of the two-party vote in Ohio.
