Council by-elections and the GOP race Welcome again to PB’s open thread which we run on most nights. Tonight’s main political action will be in three council by-elections – two in Leicestershire and one in Horsham in West Sussex. The latter looks like a solid Tory hold, Labour was only 8% behind last time in the Leicestershire NW ward while in the third, at Oadby, the Lib Dems are defending. This is a straight blue yellow spat with no Labour…
Will Dave have furthered the unionist cause? The PM, David Cameron, is in Edinburgh in what appears to be the start of the referendum campaign. Still to be agreed, of course, is the date and, potentially more controversial, the question that will be on the ballot. Clearly both camps want the wording that will be most favourable to their sides of the argument. There is a huge danger here as we saw in Alex Salmond’s speech in London yesterday. He’ll…
Is Balls starting to have an impact on VAT? The best thing for Dave & co about the latest unemployment figures was that they came out while Parliament was not sitting so he didn’t have to face Ed Miliband at PMQs. For on top of the growth figures and the hint of a credit downgrade from Moodys there was a lot for the opposition leader to play with if the parliamentary timetable had given him the chance. The “worst for…
.. There’s so much polling coming out of the US at the moment that it’s really quite hard keeping up. But I did like this because it sums up the big picture:- #WH2012: Do you think [see below] does or does not understand the needs and problems of people like yourself? . . . twitter.com/pollreport/sta… — PollingReport.com (@pollreport) February 15, 2012 @MikeSmithsonOGH
Betfair Politics Yet all the polls have the gap at 2% The chart from Betfair shows the movement in betting prices, expressed as a percentage, ahead of May’s race for the London Mayoralty. As can be seen it is about 62-38 for Boris. We had another YouGov poll this week putting the Tory ahead by 51-49 – a reversal of the last poll. The YouGov poll had London Westminster voting intention of LAB 47: CON 35: LD 9 which puts…
Will this negative attack impede the new front-runner? With just thirteen days to go before the key primaries in Michigan and Arizona one of the bodies supporting Mitt Romney has launched the first of its TV ads against Rick Santorum. This will be shown hundreds of times in the two states as well in Ohio My impression is that it’s nothing like as powerful as the ads used to destroy Newt Gingrich in Florida – in fact it’s rather lame….
Two weeks on from tonight… The epic battle that is going on for the Republican nomination for the White House is totally engrossing so much so that I find that my interest in UK politics is much lower than it usually is. This is partly because it’s a massive political betting event and I have shed loads of cash at risk, partly because I’ve been engaged by the Telegraph to write regular posts and also, of course, because I find…
Is another messy caucus outcome in the offing? On Saturday night the Maine Republican party announced that Mitt Romney had won the caucuses in the state by a margin of 194 votes over Ron Paul. Extraordinarily the result was announced even though voting in one part of the state, Washington county, had to be be postponed because the weather forecasts were suggesting heavy snow. The deferred election takes place this Saturday. Now the enthusiastic band of Ron Paul supporters are…