Ohio: Clinton tied with Trump in new Suffolk University poll
Suffolk University 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.
Ohio is traditionally a battleground state, where the GOP and the Democrats have often won similar levels of support among voters. Therefore, the election outcome here is considered important in determining the overall result of the presidential election.
Suffolk University poll results
According to the results, businessman Donald Trump and former New York Senator Hillary Clinton have identical levels of support, each with 45.0% of the vote.
The poll was carried out between October 17 and October 19. The sample size was 500 likely voters. The error margin is +/-4.4 points. This means that the levels of voter support for the Democratic and the Republican candidate do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
Single polls often contain large biases, and should be treated with caution. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, the evidence-based approach is to use combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that uses different methods and data.
For the following analysis, we translate Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. The results of the actual poll mean 50.0 % for Clinton and 50.0 % for Trump for the two-party vote share.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The most recent PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 50.7% and Trump 49.3% of the two-party vote in Ohio. Clinton has 0.7 percentage points less when the results of the poll are compared to the combined PollyVote forecast for Ohio. The PollyVote forecast is therefore outside the poll's margin of error.