Is Balls starting to have an impact on VAT? The best thing for Dave & co about the latest unemployment figures was that they came out while Parliament was not sitting so he didn’t have to face Ed Miliband at PMQs. For on top of the growth figures and the hint of a credit downgrade from Moodys there was a lot for the opposition leader to play with if the parliamentary timetable had given him the chance. The “worst for…
.. There’s so much polling coming out of the US at the moment that it’s really quite hard keeping up. But I did like this because it sums up the big picture:- #WH2012: Do you think [see below] does or does not understand the needs and problems of people like yourself? . . . twitter.com/pollreport/sta… — PollingReport.com (@pollreport) February 15, 2012 @MikeSmithsonOGH
Betfair Politics Yet all the polls have the gap at 2% The chart from Betfair shows the movement in betting prices, expressed as a percentage, ahead of May’s race for the London Mayoralty. As can be seen it is about 62-38 for Boris. We had another YouGov poll this week putting the Tory ahead by 51-49 – a reversal of the last poll. The YouGov poll had London Westminster voting intention of LAB 47: CON 35: LD 9 which puts…
Will this negative attack impede the new front-runner? With just thirteen days to go before the key primaries in Michigan and Arizona one of the bodies supporting Mitt Romney has launched the first of its TV ads against Rick Santorum. This will be shown hundreds of times in the two states as well in Ohio My impression is that it’s nothing like as powerful as the ads used to destroy Newt Gingrich in Florida – in fact it’s rather lame….
Two weeks on from tonight… The epic battle that is going on for the Republican nomination for the White House is totally engrossing so much so that I find that my interest in UK politics is much lower than it usually is. This is partly because it’s a massive political betting event and I have shed loads of cash at risk, partly because I’ve been engaged by the Telegraph to write regular posts and also, of course, because I find…
Is another messy caucus outcome in the offing? On Saturday night the Maine Republican party announced that Mitt Romney had won the caucuses in the state by a margin of 194 votes over Ron Paul. Extraordinarily the result was announced even though voting in one part of the state, Washington county, had to be be postponed because the weather forecasts were suggesting heavy snow. The deferred election takes place this Saturday. Now the enthusiastic band of Ron Paul supporters are…
Could he help the party to “re-connect”? There’s an interesting piece by Tim Shipman in the Mail that Tony Blair is taking an interest in domestic policies again. Blair, it will be recalled, is one of only three leaders in the party’s entire history to have led LAB to overall majorities in general elections The report says that many of the party’s new intake of MPs want to hear from the man who stormed to landslide victories in 1997 and…
.. And in London Boris is back on top It’s been a very big day of polling both in the US and in London. A few weeks ago two pollsters, ComRes and YouGov, both had Ken winning back City Hall by 51-49. Now there’s a new YouGov which has the same figures but the other way round. Boris is winning 51-49. This is all margin of error stuff and the big conclusion is that the race looks very tight. There’s…