Ohio: Clinton tied with Trump in new Emerson*Emerson* poll
By EmersonEmerson published the results of a new poll. In this poll, participants from Ohio were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.
In Ohio, the election outcome is usually decided by a narrow margin. Therefore, the state is commonly referred to as a battleground state, which makes it particularly interesting from a forecasting perspective.
EmersonEmerson poll results
According to the results, the two candidates can draw on equal levels of support, each with 43.0% of the vote.
The poll was conducted from August 25 to August 27 with 800 likely voters. There is a sampling error of +/-3.4 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. Hence, one should not have too much faith in the results of an individual poll. Rather, one should examine 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 results of the actual poll mean 50.0 % for Clinton and 50.0 % for Trump in the two-party vote share.
Results compared to other polls
An average of recent polls in Ohio has Clinton at 52.2% of the two-party vote. In comparison to the average forecast of other polls Clinton performed 2.2 percentage points worse in the poll. This difference is outside the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote prediction
The most recent PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 52.0% and Trump 48.0% of the two-party vote in Ohio. Clinton has 2 percentage points less when the results of the poll are compared to the combined PollyVote forecast for Ohio. Again, a look at the poll's error margin reveals that this difference is significant.
