Quinnipiac poll in Ohio: Trump trails by a slight margin
By Quinnipiac published the results of a new poll. In this poll, interviewees from Ohio were asked for whom they will vote: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
Ohio is traditionally a battleground state, where the GOP and the Democrats have historically won similar voter support. Therefore, the election outcome here is regarded critical in determining who will win the majority of electoral votes.
Quinnipiac poll results
Of those who answered the question, 49.0% said that they intend to vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while 45.0% revealed that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted from July 30 to August 7, among a random sample of 812 likely voters. Considering the poll's error margin of +/-3.4 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
In general, however, one should not have too much faith in the results of single polls, as they often incorporate large errors. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, forecasting research recommends to rely on combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that draws upon forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
For the following comparison, we convert the candidates' raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. This procedure yields figures of 52.1% for Clinton and 47.9% for Trump.
Results in comparison to other polls
An average of recent polls in Ohio sees Clinton at 52.2% of the two-party vote. This value is 0.1 percentage points higher than her respective numbers in the Quinnipiac poll. This difference is within the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The current PollyVote forecasts Clinton to gain 52.0% of the two-party vote in Ohio. This means that Polly's forecast is 0.1 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin reveals that this deviation is negligible.
