Bloomberg poll in Ohio: Clinton trails by 5 points
Results of a new poll carried out by Bloomberg were published. The poll asked interviewees from Ohio for whom they will vote: Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.
Ohio is traditionally a purple state, where Republicans and Democrats have historically won similar voter support. Hence, the election outcome here is regarded crucial in determining who will win the majority of electoral votes.
Bloomberg poll results
Of those who responded, 43.0% said that they would vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while 48.0% said that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out from September 9 to September 12 with 802 likely voters. The margin of error is +/-3.5 points. This means that the levels of voter support for Trump and Clinton do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
In general, however, you should not have too much faith in the results of single polls, as they often contain large errors. Instead of relying on results from single polls, forecasting research recommends to rely on combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that incorporates forecasts from different methods, each of which incorporates different data.
For the following analysis, we convert Clinton's and Trump's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. The resulting figures are 47.3% for Clinton and 52.8% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
Trump is currently at 50.6% of the major two-party vote in an average of recent polls in Ohio. This value is 2.2 percentage points lower than his respective numbers in the Bloomberg poll. This margin is within the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll compared with PollyVote's forecast
The latest PollyVote expects Trump to gain 48.7% of the two-party vote in Ohio. That is, the PollyVote forecast is 4.1 points below his polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is therefore outside the poll's sampling error.