Ohio: Clinton tied with Trump in new Emerson poll
By Emerson released the results of a new poll, in which respondents from Ohio were asked for whom they will vote: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
Ohio is traditionally a battleground state, where the Republican and Democratic candidates have often achieved similar voter support. This is the reason why the election outcome in that state is considered critical in determining the overall result of the presidential election.
Emerson poll results
According to the results, the two candidates have equal levels of support, each with 43.0% of the vote.
The poll was conducted between August 25 and August 27. The sample size was 800 likely voters. There is a sampling error of +/-3.4 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the race is currently a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Hence, don't put too much trust in the results of an individual poll. At the very least, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
For the following comparison, we translate Clinton's and Trump's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. The results of the actual poll mean 50.0 % for Clinton and 50.0 % for Trump for the two-party vote share.
Comparison to other polls
Clinton currently achieves 52.0% of the major two-party vote according to an average of recent polls in Ohio. In comparison to the average forecast of other polls Clinton performed 2 percentage points worse in the poll. This difference is outside the poll's margin of error, which means that the poll is an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The most recent PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 51.9% and Trump 48.2% of the two-party vote in Ohio. Clinton has 1.9 percentage points less when the results of the poll are compared to the combined PollyVote forecast for Ohio. Again, a look at the poll's error margin suggests that this difference is significant.
