YouGov: Con 41 (-3) Lab 31 (+7) Lib Dems 16 (-4) Two big stories from the UK and US tonight. At home, results from the YouGov poll for the Sun have given Labour a seven-point poll bounce in the wake of Brown’s speech to Conference. In the USA, McCain has called for the first debate, scheduled for Friday night in Oxford, Mississippi, to be postponed. He said he is suspending his campaign and returning to Washington to help deal with…
Wikimedia Commons But Taro Aso is the strong favourite to be the LDP’s fourth leader this term Following Tzipi Livni’s 431-vote victory in the Kadima leadership this week, five contenders are lined up to take over the LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) in Japan tomorrow. Unlike Livni, who has her work cut out trying to put a coalition together (maybe a 50% chance at best) before she can become Israel’s PM, whoever follows Yasuo Fukuda at the LDP helm will certainly…
News of the World reports more bad news to come for Brown As the Labour Conference gets underway and the party tries to present a united front, there is more bad news for the PM today, with the News of the World reporting that four more members of the government are preparing to resign. The paper says that two of the four are mid-ranking ministers and two are ministerial assistants, although their identities have not been hinted at – they…
Is 2008 going to prove to be just a twist on 2000/2004? Using the highly-addictive site 270-to-win, I’ve recreated the political map that confronted us after Al Gore’s popular vote margin failed to give him the White House in 2000. The result in the Electoral College that year was Bush 271 v 266 Gore, one of the tightest results ever. Re-apportionment of Congressional Districts as a result of the decennial census has changed the number of Electoral College votes each…
Does his latest session merely add to the confusion? As Mike has noted before, when Frank Luntz conducted focus groups on the Labour leadership back in September 2006, there was a complete lack of appetite for Gordon Brown. The other much-noted result was the extent to which these findings dashed the hopes of Alan Johnson. The results were not just definitive – they were damning. So what are we to make of last night Luntz performance for Newsnight, when he…
Livni 47-49, Mofaz 37, Dichter 7, Sheetrit 7 – but could she form a government? The polls closed in the Kadima leadership primary at 8.30 UK time, with turnout reportedly above 50% and voting extended by 30 minutes. Exit polls released by Channels 1, 2, and 10 in Israel gave the Foreign Minister at least a 10-point lead over Shaul Mofaz. However, the BBC correspondent in Tel Aviv has urged caution as Israel’s exit polls have not got a strong…
Will it enable Obama to refocus more strongly on the economy? The economic and financial impacts of the failure of Lehman Brothers have been rippling outwards today as stock markets around the world are sharply down (with the FTSE dropping almost 4% and the Dow currently down about 2.5%). But what will be the political consequences of the events on Wall Street? With the polls and the markets narrowing in the White House race, is this one “event” that actually…
Three ministers set to quit The Evening Standard is reporting that that a Minister of State, a junior minister and several Parliamentary Private Secretaries are set to resign in a bid to oust the Prime Minister. Also, the Daily Telegraph is reporting that Thursday’s NEC will be the focus for an attempted coup by MPs, and that the PM has been “put on warning by senior party figures that he has only a matter of weeks to save his troubled…