William Hill have a market up on whether Donald Trump will replace J.D. Vance as his running mate, nothing Trump would do would surprise me but we are close to the point where Vance’s name would go on to the ballot papers and cannot be removed. Ditching Vance would be Trump admitting he made a boo boo in appointing the cat hating weirdo which is unlike the self confessed pussy grabber. So a 4% return in a few months might…
I am generally characterised as a gobby bastard so when I am left speechless something epically bad must have happened. Liz Truss trying to fill the black hole caused by the markets being spooked by her special fiscal operation was to considering scrapping all NHS cancer treatment to save money. Normally I’d dismiss this story as a silly season story but the fact so many people are prepared to go on the record about this to Sir Anthony Seldon makes…
The primary reason I have been expecting Donald Trump to win in November was the economy an area he normally led Biden then Harris however it might appear that lead is ephemeral thanks to this polling from YouGov. Trump and his confederates have tried to mischaracterise the Harris/Walz economic agenda as unabashed communism yet we can see those policies enjoy wide support. Perhaps it will be the economy that wins it for Kamala Harris. TSE
Ordinarily when a Labour leader polls circa 33% at a general election it triggers a leadership election however in one of those statistical quirks like Sir Donald Bradman’s test average, no matter how many times you look at it thinking it must be a mistake it turns out be right, Starmer won 411 seats and a 174 seat majority with a 33.7% share of the vote. The story in yesterday’s Times about Starmer looking to change the voting system for…
The survey was conducted Aug. 17-20 using a voter list of 801 registered voters nationwide. It was carried out by Braun Research and has a simple sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points at a 95 percent confidence interval. The bulk of the fieldwork took place before the Democratic Party convention so it is possible the next poll from this pollster could see an even bigger Harris lead. TSE
After the shellacking the SNP received last month and coupled with the fact the SNP will have been in power for nineteen years in May 2026 it feels inevitable that the SNP would lose the next Holyrood election but a poll showing them to be the largest party in Holyrood in 2026 seems a bit counter-intuitive. I respect Norstat as a pollster, going back to their Panelbase days, but any poll that shows Reform winning eight seats at Holyrood screams…
Graph from Betdata.io TSE
My strategy for laying Kemi Badenoch in the race to succeed Sunak is that Tory MPs will ensure she isn’t in the final two but if that assumption turns out to be wrong then I will be going to the poorhouse. YouGov have an excellent track record in Tory leadership elections so I trust this polling implicitly, in some of the other head to heads it shows Robert Jenrick might be misunderestimated by the betting markets TSE