Ohio: Clinton tied with Trump in latest Emerson*Emerson* poll
By Results of a new poll conducted by EmersonEmerson were published. The poll asked interviewees from Ohio for whom they will vote: Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton or Republican candidate Donald Trump.
Historically, Ohio has been a swing state, in which neither the GOP nor the Democrats have had overwhelming support to secure its electoral college votes. This is why forecasts in this state are of particular importance.
EmersonEmerson poll results
According to the results, both candidates have the exact same level 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. Therefore, as a general rule, you should not have too much confidence in the results of an individual poll. Rather, one should examine how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
For the following analysis, we convert Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. The results of the actual poll mean 50.0 % for Clinton and 50.0 % for Trump concerning the two-party vote share.
Comparison to other polls
Clinton currently runs at 52.2% of the two-party vote according to an average of recent polls in Ohio. In comparison to the average forecast of other polls Clinton performed 2.2 percentage points worse in the poll. This deviation is outside the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
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 margin of error reveals that this difference is significant.
