Ohio: Clinton and Trump neck-and-neck in new PPP (D) poll
By PPP (D) released the results of a new poll, in which respondents from Ohio were asked for whom they will vote: Republican nominee Donald Trump or Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton.
In Ohio, the election outcome is usually decided by a narrow margin. Therefore, the state is commonly regarded as a battleground state, which makes it particularly interesting from a forecasting perspective.
PPP (D) poll results
Of those who replied, 48.0% said that they plan to vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, whereas 47.0% indicated that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out from October 5 to October 6 among 782 likely voters. There is a sampling error of +/-3.5 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. Therefore, as a general rule, don't have too much confidence in the results of a single poll. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, forecasting research recommends to use combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that incorporates different methods and data.
To make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, one can convert them into two-party vote shares. This yields figures of 50.5% for Clinton and 49.5% for Trump. For comparison: Only 50.0% was gained by Clinton in the PPP (D) poll on July 24, for Trump this number was only 0.0%.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote forecast
The current PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 50.9% of the two-party vote in Ohio. This means that Polly's combined forecast is 0.4 points above her polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is thus in line with the poll's error margin.
