After spousal introductions at conference, could debates be next? One of the novelties of this week in British politics was seeing the Prime Minister introduced at the Labour Party Conference by his wife, Sarah Brown. In a short introductory address, she was chosen to help her husband connect with voters and to put ‘a human face on government’. I think the consensus was that she did very well in an unfamiliar role, and her decision drew plaudits from across the…
Which candidate will be happier with their performance? Given the spectacle presented for our delectation only a couple of hours ago, I cannot have been alone in wishing Senators McCain and Obama had resolved to stay in Washington, rather than attend the first Presidential debate at Ole Miss. In retrospect, I would actually have preferred that the negotiations over the Congressional bailout had been televised instead. The clear consensus on PB.com was that this was a boring affair, peppered with…
What if McCain just doesn’t show? With the first of the presidential debates due to start at 2am UK time there’s still a lot of confusion over whether or not the GOP nominee, John McCain will actually show up. The Irish bookmakers, Intrade, have been running a market on whether or not this will happen. The venue is in Oxford Mississippi where something like $5m has been spent on organising the event and everything looked fine until McCain’s call on…
Is he planning to reject the President’s bail-out plan? Ever since this picture was taken at a rally six months ago it has proved to be a major embarrassment to the McCain campaign which has been desperate to detach itself from the man who has become the most unpopular president in American polling history, George Bush. But a striking image is worth so much more than even the most power set of words and the picture has been used time…
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…
How can he stop the seepage of support? The big trend in recent days from the White House race has been the move back to Obama in the polls after appears what appears now to have been a temporary blip following the Palin pick and the GOP convention aftermath. In the betting the latest Obama price suggests a 62% implied probability with McCain on 38%. Just over a week ago both contenders were heading towards evens. In the polls Obama…
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…
Can McCain-Palin win back the initiative again? The latest polls in the White House race show that there’s been a sharp swing-back to Obama and he now has leads in almost all of them for the first time since McCain turned the election on its head with his choice of V-P. Within the past hour the CBC/New York Times poll had McCain’s 43% to Obama’s 49%. Earlier we had:- Gallup: Obama 47%, McCain 45% Diageo/Hotline: Obama 45%, McCain 42% Research…