Ohio: New NBC-WSJ-Marist poll has Trump trailing by 5 points

Results of a new poll conducted by NBC-WSJ-Marist were circulated. The poll asked respondents from Ohio for whom they will vote: Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton or Republican candidate Donald Trump.

Ohio is traditionally a battleground state, where the candidates of both major parties have often achieved similar levels of support among voters. This is why the election outcome here is viewed as important in determining the overall result of the presidential election.

The results show that 43.0% of interviewees will give their vote to former First Lady Hillary Clinton, while 38.0% plan to vote for businessman Donald Trump.

The poll was conducted from August 3 to August 7 among 889 registered voters. Taking into account the poll's error margin of +/-3.3 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.

Putting the results in context

In general, however, a good strategy is to not have too much faith in the results of single polls, because they often incorporate large errors. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, the recommended strategy use combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that relies on different methods and data.

To make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, one can translate them into two-party vote shares. The resulting figures are 53.1% for Clinton and 46.9% for Trump.

Results in comparison to other polls

An average of recent polls in Ohio has Clinton at 52.2% of the two-party vote. This value is 0.9 percentage points lower than her corresponding numbers in the NBC-WSJ-Marist poll. This difference is within the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.

Comparison to the combined PollyVote

The most recent PollyVote foresees Clinton to gain 52.0% of the two-party vote in Ohio. Hence, Polly's combined forecast is 1.1 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error suggests that this difference is insignificant.

This article was automatically generated by the PollyBot, which uses algorithms developed by AX Semantics to generate text from data stored in our API. The exact dataset underlying this particular article can be found here.

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