Are you best to stay out of it? Two months ago I posted here that I was pulling out of the betting on who would share the tickets with Barack Obama and John McCain because it was so difficult for anybody to who out who was going to be chosen. I’ve got several hundred pounds at risk and I am convinced that I’m going to be a loser. I’ve managed to keep away from the betting apart from a brief…
Is now the time to be betting against Barack? Several people on the site have been making the point in the past couple of days that Betfair and other UK betting firms are trailing behind the US-focussed markets on the McCain-Obama battle. Quite simply, given recent polling, this is much tighter than the betting prices here might suggest. Thus the automated telephone pollster, Rasmussen, is reporting today that its tracking poll now has McCain ahead by one point and across…
What is the impact of a nominee for POTUS having worn the uniform? “To err is human; to forgive, divine. Neither is the stated policy of the United States Marine Corps.” During the final stages of the primary season, when McCain was already the presumptive nominee but Clinton and Obama were still fighting their way to the Democratic nomination, I commented that the three candidates were all suited to different variants of the job. Rather glibly, I suggested that I…
Did his foreign trip make him look too presumptuous? Barack Obama has returned to the US after his whirlwind foreign tour to find that some polls are now going against him. Was it wise or not and should he have avoided the mass rally in Berlin? We don’t know the long term impact but after sifting through the reports again I could not help being reminded of Labour’s famous Sheffield rally a week before the 1992 General Election. This came…
Why are Mike Huckabee and Bill Richardson no longer being touted for VP? Today’s front page of the Wall Street Journal leads with claims that both Obama and McCain are about to announce their VP choices in the coming week. They give a list of prospective candidates on the ‘Narrow List’ that everyone here will be familiar with from our discussions. For McCain, Governors Pawlenty (MN), Crist (FL) and Palin (AK) join Carly Fiorina (CEO of HP), fmr Governor Mitt…
Has Hillary’s loss helped future female Presidential hopefuls? I’ll start with a controversial premise: Hillary Clinton failing to win the Democratic nomination might well have been the best thing that could have happened, from the perspective of those who like the idea of living under a female President of the United States. I have little doubt that Hillary Clinton would have beaten John McCain – largely because she was better equipped to secure Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Florida than Obama,…
How is this going to impact on the fight with McCain? As we wait for the Glasgow polls to close the big international political story has been Obama’s speech in Berlin. You can watch it in full here. American election betting – live prices. Mike Smithson
For one week in August, Politicalbetting.com will be reporting from Denver Back in March, I sent in some application forms to the DNC and RNC so that PoliticalBetting.com could be credentialled alongside other media outlets to cover the Nominating Conventions from Denver and Minneapolis-St. Paul respectively. The RNC gave us an unequivocal rejection (the Right seems less interested in what Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) called “a Series of Tubes“ than the Left) but the Democrats have made some accommodation for…