Political Observer comments.

This discussion begins at the 01:20 point and ends before the 21:18 point. Katy Balls asks questions of her two guests

Ferguson and Grey act the parts of Political Technocrats, relying on ‘Polling Data’ as a reliable source- the mention, and reliance on the ‘polls’, as some kind of measure of actual reliable information, about outcomes, the cornerstones of both Ferguson and Grey, is utterly misplaced, given this from the Pew Research Center, about the 2016 American Election.

November 9, 2016

Headline: Why 2016 election polls missed their mark

The results of Tuesday’s presidential election came as a surprise to nearly everyone who had been following the national and state election polling, which consistently projected Hillary Clinton as defeating Donald Trump. Relying largely on opinion polls, election forecasters put Clinton’s chance of winning at anywhere from 70% to as high as 99%, and pegged her as the heavy favorite to win a number of states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that in the end were taken by Trump.

How could the polls have been so wrong about the state of the election?

There is a great deal of speculation but no clear answers as to the cause of the disconnect, but there is one point of agreement: Across the board, polls underestimated Trump’s level of support. With few exceptions, the final round of public polling showed Clinton with a lead of 1 to 7 percentage points in the national popular vote. State-level polling was more variable, but there were few instances where polls overstated Trump’s support.

The fact that so many forecasts were off-target was particularly notable given the increasingly wide variety of methodologies being tested and reported via the mainstream media and other channels. The traditional telephone polls of recent decades are now joined by increasing numbers of high profile, online probability and nonprobability sample surveys, as well as prediction markets, all of which showed similar errors.

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Why 2016 election polls missed their mark

It isn’t that the ‘insights’ that Ferguson and Grey are not interesting, to a point. This featured quotation from Ferguson, is about his notion of what constitutes a possible ‘Left Wing’ in America?

‘The night that it’s clear that Trump has been re-elected, heads will be exploding on the Harvard campus, in the New York Times offices, in the CNN offices, and the market will be rallying.’

What is left unsaid, by both Ferguson and Grey, is that Trump is a symptom of the complete collapse of the political/ moral legitimacy of both the Republican and New Democrats, as viable political entities.

In the final portion of this interview Katy Balls asks Ferguson who he, as an American citizen, will vote for: the answer is Trump.

Political Observer