What we need to know is how people will vote? As someone who uses polls to try to predict elections and win bets I’ve always been very wary of polling questions which ask respondents for their opinion – not for an indication of what they would do in an election. This based on the last two general elections only about 60% of people actually vote so the results you get from the opinion questions are distorted by the views of…
Is McCain’s plan for a ‘League of Democracies’ the answer? On May Day of last year, John McCain addressed the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California. As the Republican primary candidate with the most foreign policy experience, his remarks received a significant amount of attention. The key idea in the speech was that, if elected President, McCain would call a summit of the Democratically-elected world leaders, and discuss with them how global problems might be solved. He described the…
What are the significant implications for US and UK foreign policy? You could be forgiven for not being immediately familiar with the small mountain region of South Ossetia, and its capital Tskhinvali. Few people last week could have correctly identified it as (legally, at least) a province of Georgia, and fewer still would have known that its comparitively-peaceable sister region North Ossetia remained a part of the Russian Federation. The two provinces consider themselves to be a single ethnolinguistic entity,…
Could Tzipi Livni become Israel’s first woman PM since Golda Meir? Ehud Olmert, mired in corruption allegations, announced earlier this week that he would not contest September’s Kadima leadership primary. With a weak mandate to start with (just 29 seats and 22% of the vote in 2006), the Lebanon war, unpopularity to rival Gordon Brown’s, and the recent investigations, he will leave office as one of the shortest-serving PMs since the creation of Israel in 1948, although should his efforts…
Wikimedia Commons “Your turf accountant… doesn’t have a clue” Amongst all the articles about Brown and Obama today there’s this piece by Alan Watkins in the Independent. [The odds] are largely made up – to begin with, at any rate. I once talked at length to a representative of one of our largest bookmaking firms, who specialised in political betting. It was, he explained, a very small part of their turnover. They did it for the sake of the publicity,…
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,…
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…
Will Hooker looks ahead to next year’s Federal elections In the same way that the Holy Roman Empire was not holy, not Roman, and not an Empire, the current grand coalition government of Germany is not grand, not a coalition, and barely a government. Although its feuding members somehow managed to agree a budget for 2009, the entire focus of the next 12 months will be on positioning the parties for a general election next autumn. The main theme of…