Could this be the make or break moment? Well it seems as though the first presidential debate is going ahead after all and a huge TV audience is expected for the Obama-McCain clash from Oxford, Mississippi. It’s due to start at 0200 UK time and will last for ninety minutes. Live White House Race betting odds Mike Smithson
The Guardian’s monthly ICM poll is just out and produces vote shares very much in the same ball-park as the YouGov poll earlier in the week. Fieldwork for the latter was taken on Tuesday and Wednesday while the former was carried out on Wednesday and Thursday. Labour will feel encouraged and the Tories will still be pleased to be above the 40% mark even though they have been almost totally out of the headlines for weeks. The timing of the…
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…
Aren’t Votes are votes whatever the motivation? In the Times today Peter Riddell is arguing that the latest Populus poll suggests that the prospective Conservative vote at the next general election is “soft” because a large proportion say it’s because they are anti-Labour rather than being pro-Tory. The figures show that of the Tory voters in the poll just 56% said they would do so because they are pro-Tory while 44% are just anti-Labour This compares with Labour supporters where…
The possibility that Gordon Brown could be leaving the Labour leader’s job has spurred our efforts to get a new masthead which is in a very different style to the old ones. In the four and a half years since we were established we’ve stuck with incorporating pictures of politicians in one form or another on the masthead. This was good at first but it required constant updating when new figures came in and old figures went out. It also…
Is it time for punters to cash in on the annual polling quirk? On the face of it today’s YouGov poll is great for Labour, a warning to the Tories and bad news for the Lib Dems who have seen all their gains of last week just wiped out. In fact polls bang in the middle of conference season are usually totally misleading and merely reflect that whoever was on most recently was getting an extra publicity boost. This is…
What’s the leadership fallout from Manchester? Gordon Brown – better conference than might have been expected. Speech OK with party activists and might expect a poll boost. Looks like he’ll survive at least until the 2009 local and Euro elections. Good conference. Harriet Harman – will have upset Tory supporters with the personal nature of her attacks on Cameron but went down well with the delegates. She’s still there and she owes her position a contested election of the whole…
Do Brown’s survival chances look better? Sorry about the site going down in the middle of the speech. We’ve been overwhelmed by traffic with so many wanting to follow the discussion. I found interesting the way he name-checked almost every single cabinet member – that’s a Brown innovation. He very rarely recognises that there is anybody else within his government. Overall I felt there was a surprising lack of passion. I was expecting much more than that. There was also…