Ohio: New Monmouth poll has Trump behind by 4 points
By Results of a new poll carried out by Monmouth were spread. The poll asked participants from Ohio for whom they will vote: Donald·Trump or Hillary·Clinton.
In Ohio, the popular vote is usually decided by a narrow margin. Therefore, the state is commonly referred to 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 plan to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, while 39.0% indicated that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out from August 18 to August 21 among 402 likely voters. Considering the poll's error margin of +/-4.9 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Therefore, as a general rule, don't be overly confident the results of a single poll. At the very least, one should examine how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
To make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, one can translate them into shares of the two-party vote. The resulting figures are 52.4% for Clinton and 47.6% for Trump.
Results compared to other polls
Clinton can currently count on 52.2% of the major 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 worse. This margin is within the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The most recent PollyVote foresees Clinton to gain 51.9% of the two-party vote in Ohio. This means that Polly's prediction is 0.5 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's margin of error indicates that this deviation is negligible.
