Latest Monmouth poll in Ohio: Trump trails by a marginal margin
By Monmouth published the results of a new poll. In this poll, interviewees from Ohio were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton or Republican candidate Donald Trump.
In Ohio, the popular vote is usually close. This is why the state is commonly regarded as a swing state, which makes it particularly interesting from a forecasting perspective.
Monmouth poll results
Of those who replied, 43.0% said that they are going to vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, while 39.0% declared that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out from August 18 to August 21 among 402 likely voters. The margin of error is +/-4.9 points, which means that the levels of voter support for both parties' candidates do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Hence, you should not have too much faith in the results of an individual poll. Rather than relying on results from single polls, the evidence-based approach is to look at combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that incorporates different methods and data.
For the following comparison, we convert the candidates' raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. This procedure yields figures of 52.4% for Clinton and 47.6% for Trump.
Results in comparison to other polls
Clinton can currently count on 52.2% of the two-party vote in an average of recent polls in Ohio. Relative to her numbers in the Monmouth poll Clinton's poll average is 0.2 percentage points worse. This margin is within the poll's margin of error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote forecast
The latest PollyVote anticipates Clinton to gain 51.9% of the two-party vote in Ohio. Hence, the PollyVote is 0.5 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's margin of error indicates that this difference is negligible.
