Ohio: Dead heat between Clinton and Trump in new Emerson poll
Results of a new poll carried out by Emerson were spread. The poll asked interviewees from Ohio for whom they will vote: Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton or Republican candidate Donald Trump.
In Ohio, the popular vote is usually decided by a narrow margin. This is the reason why the state is commonly considered a battleground state, which makes it particularly interesting from a forecasting perspective.
Emerson poll results
Of those who responded, 45.0% said that they plan to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, while 43.0% declared that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted from October 10 to October 12, among a random sample of 600 likely voters. The error margin is +/-3.9 points. This means that the poll results for Clinton and Trump do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
Single polls should be treated with caution, as they often contain substantial biases. Rather, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
For the following analysis, we translate Clinton's and Trump's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure yields values of 51.1% for Clinton and 48.9% for Trump. On August 27 Clinton obtained only 50.0% in the Emerson poll and Trump obtained only 0.0%.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The current PollyVote forecasts Clinton to gain 51.4% of the two-party vote in Ohio. This means that Polly's combined forecast is 0.3 points above her polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is thus in line with the poll's sampling error.