Monmouth poll in Ohio: Trump behind by 4 points
By Monmouth published the results of a new poll. In this poll, participants from Ohio were asked for whom they will vote: Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton.
In Ohio, the election outcome is often close. Therefore, the state is commonly regarded as a swing state, which makes it particularly interesting from a forecasting perspective.
Monmouth poll results
Of those who answered the question, 43.0% said that they would vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whereas 39.0% said that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from August 18 to August 21 among 402 likely voters. Considering the poll's margin of error of +/-4.9 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. As a result, a good strategy is to not be overly confident the results of a single poll. At the very least, one should examine how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
In order to make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, one can convert them into two-party vote shares. The resulting figures are 52.4% for Clinton and 47.6% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
If we look at an average of Ohio polls, Clinton's current two-party vote share is at 52.2%. This value is 0.2 percentage points lower than her corresponding numbers in the Monmouth poll. This difference is within the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The current PollyVote foresees Clinton to gain 52.0% of the two-party vote in Ohio. This means that the combined PollyVote is 0.4 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin suggests that this deviation is negligible.
