Ohio: Trump with marginal lead in recent Bloomberg poll
By Results of a new poll administered by Bloomberg were distributed. The poll asked participants from Ohio for whom they will vote: Donald·Trump or Hillary·Clinton.
In Ohio, the popular vote is often decided by a narrow margin. Therefore, the state is commonly regarded as a battleground state, which makes it particularly interesting from a forecasting perspective.
Bloomberg poll results
Of those who responded, 43.0% said that they will vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while 48.0% indicated that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted from September 9 to September 12, among a random sample of 802 likely voters. If one takes into account the poll's margin of error of +/-3.5 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
Individual polls should be treated with caution, since they often include large biases. At least, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from other methods, one can convert them into two-party vote shares. This yields figures of 47.3% for Clinton and 52.8% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
An average of recent polls in Ohio sees Trump at 50.6% of the two-party vote. Compared to his numbers in the Bloomberg poll Trump's poll average is 2.2 percentage points worse. This deviation is within the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote forecast
The current PollyVote expects Trump to gain 48.7% of the two-party vote in Ohio. That is, Polly's forecast is 4.1 points below his polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error reveals that this difference is significant.
