Ohio: New Monmouth poll shows Clinton with 4 points lead
By Results of a new poll conducted by Monmouth were spread. The poll asked respondents from Ohio for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
In Ohio, the popular vote is often decided by a narrow margin. This is why the state is commonly viewed as a purple state, which makes it particularly interesting from a forecasting perspective.
Monmouth poll results
According to the results, 43.0% of interviewees intend to give their vote to former First Lady Hillary Clinton, whereas 39.0% would vote for real estate developer Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted from August 18 to August 21, among a random sample of 402 likely voters. There is a sampling error of +/-4.9 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the race is currently a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
Single polls should be treated with caution, since they often contain substantial biases. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, forecasting research recommends to look at combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that includes different methods and data.
To make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, you can convert them into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure yields values of 52.4% for Clinton and 47.6% for Trump.
Results in comparison to other polls
Clinton currently achieves 52.2% of the two-party vote in an average of recent polls in Ohio. Compared to her numbers in the Monmouth poll Clinton's poll average is 0.2 percentage points lower. This difference is within the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll in comparison with PollyVote's forecast
The current PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 52.0% of the two-party vote in Ohio. This means that the PollyVote is 0.4 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin shows that this deviation is negligible.
