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Do this year’s double local elections provide a return route? If the bookies are right, Boris Johnson is well-placed for a second term as London’s Mayor. If the pollsters most recent results are right, it’s too close to call. Those two things aren’t necessarily contradictory – the polls reflect people’s intentions now whereas the bookies are taking bets on what they expect to happen in May. It may be that Johnson will campaign more effectively than Livingston, or that the…

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Recent Threads

Have we got out of the habit of buying papers? When the News of the World was closed last July there was a big effort from other titles to try to grab a share of what was the biggest selling Sunday paper. The latest circulation numbers, see here, suggest they had some success but they failed to pick up a lot of the lost sales. The Sunday Mirror, the People, the Sunday Express, the Star on Sunday and the Mail…

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Portland Press How come all the initial errors are in his favour? If you think that we have been here before we have. After the debacle in Iowa at the start of January which led to Mitt Romney’s victory on the night being taken away from him there now must be a good chance that the same is about to happen in Maine. On Saturday night there was an enormous sigh of relief at Romney’s Boston HQ when the news…

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Council by-elections and the GOP race Welcome again to PB’s open thread which we run on most nights. Tonight’s main political action will be in three council by-elections – two in Leicestershire and one in Horsham in West Sussex. The latter looks like a solid Tory hold, Labour was only 8% behind last time in the Leicestershire NW ward while in the third, at Oadby, the Lib Dems are defending. This is a straight blue yellow spat with no Labour…

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Will Dave have furthered the unionist cause? The PM, David Cameron, is in Edinburgh in what appears to be the start of the referendum campaign. Still to be agreed, of course, is the date and, potentially more controversial, the question that will be on the ballot. Clearly both camps want the wording that will be most favourable to their sides of the argument. There is a huge danger here as we saw in Alex Salmond’s speech in London yesterday. He’ll…

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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…

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.. 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