Monmouth poll in Ohio: Clinton with slim advantage
By Monmouth released the results of a new poll, in which respondents from Ohio were asked 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 clinch that state's electoral college votes. This is the reason why predictions here are of particular interest.
Monmouth poll results
Of those who responded, 43.0% said that they would vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while 39.0% said that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted from August 18 to August 21, among a random sample of 402 likely voters. If one takes into account the poll's sampling error of +/-4.9 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
Individual polls often include large errors, which is why they should be treated with caution. At the very least, one should examine how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, we convert them into two-party vote shares. This procedure yields values of 52.4% for Clinton and 47.6% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
If we look at an average of Ohio polls, Clinton's current two-party vote share is at 52.2%. This value is 0.2 percentage points lower than her corresponding numbers in the Monmouth poll. This deviation is within the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote prediction
The current PollyVote anticipates Clinton to gain 51.9% of the two-party vote in Ohio. Hence, Polly's forecast is 0.5 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's margin of error indicates that this difference is negligible.
