Ohio: Narrow advantage for Clinton in recent NBC-WSJ-Marist poll
By Results of a new poll administered by NBC-WSJ-Marist were published. The poll asked interviewees from Ohio for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
Historically, Ohio has been a battleground state, in which neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have had overwhelming support to secure its electoral college votes. Therefore, predictions in this state are of particular interest.
NBC-WSJ-Marist poll results
The results show that 43.0% of interviewees plan to cast a ballot for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, while 38.0% would vote for businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out from August 3 to August 7 with 889 registered voters. Considering the poll's margin of error of +/-3.3 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Hence, one should not have too much confidence in the results of an individual poll. Instead of relying on results from single polls, we recommend to consult combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that draws upon different methods and data.
To make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, you can translate them into two-party vote shares. This procedure yields values of 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. Compared to her numbers in the NBC-WSJ-Marist poll Clinton's poll average is 0.9 percentage points lower. This difference is within the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote forecast
The most recent PollyVote anticipates Clinton to gain 52.0% of the two-party vote in Ohio. This means that Polly's forecast is 1.1 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's margin of error suggests that this difference is insignificant.
