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Category: WHITE HOUSE RACE

Guess which of these polls had mobile users in their samples?

Guess which of these polls had mobile users in their samples?

If Obama wins big will UK pollsters have to change? The chart is from Nate Silver’s excellent fivethirtyeight.com and shows the Obama leads from the major national White House polls colour-coded according to whether the firms do or do not include cellphone users in their samples. You guessed it – the ones in yellow did while the one in grey restrict their samples to people who could by standard land-lines. There has long been a debate on both sides of…

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Why my 50/1 shot is going to win AND WIN BIG

Why my 50/1 shot is going to win AND WIN BIG

Has the heart gone out of McCain supporters? One of the perils of being in the political prediction business is that what you write can come back to haunt you and I have made my fair share of wrong calls. But there is one prediction of which I take enormous pride – made here on the site just four months after Bush had been installed for his second term. In support of my argument on May 26th 2005 that people…

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Re-visiting the McCain “Firewall” betting

Re-visiting the McCain “Firewall” betting

Peter the Punters offers his “money-making” guide Two weeks ago we ran a piece on Ladbrokes’ innovative market, the McCain Firewall Finder, which challenged punters to find the highest State in the list below that John McCain would win in next Tuesday’s election. This generated some lively discussion and apparently quite a few bets, according to PB regular Matthew Shaddick [Shadsy] who devised and is running the market on behalf of the Magic Sign. In view of this interest and…

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Will this seal the deal or open up more questions?

Will this seal the deal or open up more questions?

click the panel to watch it in full What do we think of Obama’s $4m “Infomercial”? The major event in the White House race overnight was the half hour commercial that the Obama campaign placed at peak times on almost all the networks and which cost an estimated $4m. When I heard of the plan my initial reaction was to think that it was a mistake – a bit like his mass rally in Berlin. Obama is already under fire…

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Before we get off the subject of certainties….

Before we get off the subject of certainties….

Remember the most famous front page in political journalism As we contemplate how certain we are about an Obama victory next Tuesday perhaps we ought to remind ourselves of the dangers of jumping the gun. The picture is, of course, the famous one of Harry Truman on the morning in 1948 when he was re-elected president, holding up a copy of that day’s Chicago paper with the headline completely wrong. Truman won an emphatic victory of 303-189 in electoral college…

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Should I put my pension lump sum on Obama?

Should I put my pension lump sum on Obama?

How much of a certainty is the Democrat? One group of people who the politicians seem to be ignoring are those like me who look to the interest from their savings for part of their monthly income. Having avoided putting my pension lump sum into shares and then kept well away from the Icelandic banks I now have a problem. After tax the net return from my savings is less than 3% and it looks as though this will get…

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What do we think of the Keith Mothersson’s scenario?

What do we think of the Keith Mothersson’s scenario?

Could Obama really be robbed of victory in this way? [Keith Mothersson of the Campaign for Visible Ballots has been following the US election integrity movement since 2000. In this guest slot he gives his assessment of the current state of play.] Psephologists sometimes look too closely at opinion polls, naively assuming a predictable feed through into election results. The election in the US is a genuine no-holds-barred struggle which could easily go all the way the Supreme Court and/or…

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Which way should you be betting in the closing stages?

Which way should you be betting in the closing stages?

Could McCain-Palin pull something back in the final few days? The panel shows the latest spread prices on the US election from Sporting Index where there has been a further move away from John McCain in the past day. The other markets from IG Index and Spreadfair are a bit more favourable to McCain in their electoral college votes spread. A full range of betting exchange and convention bookie US Election prices is here. A big question now is what’s…

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