Monmouth poll in Ohio: Trump trails by 4 points
By Results of a new poll conducted by Monmouth were published. The poll asked interviewees from Ohio for whom they will vote: Republican nominee Donald Trump or Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton.
Ohio is traditionally a swing state, where Democrats and Republicans have often won similar levels of voter support. This is the reason why the election outcome in that state is considered important in determining who will win the majority of electoral votes.
Monmouth poll results
According to the results, 43.0% of respondents said that they would cast a ballot for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, while 39.0% plan to vote for billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from August 18 to August 21. A total of 402 likely voters responded. The error margin is +/-4.9 points. This means that the levels of voter support for the candidates of both parties do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
In general, however, a good strategy is to not have too much faith in the results of single polls, since they sometimes incorporate large errors. At the very least, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
For the following comparison, we translate Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. The corresponding figures are 47.6% for Clinton and 0.0% for Trump.
Results in comparison to other polls
Looking at an average of Ohio polls, Clinton's two-party vote share is currently at 47.2%. This value is 0.4 percentage points lower than corresponding numbers in the Monmouth poll. This difference is within the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll in comparison with PollyVote's prediction
The current PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 48.0% of the two-party vote in Ohio. Hence, the PollyVote is 0.4 points above polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is therefore in line with the poll's error margin.
