Screen shot from the Daily Politics What’ll be the polling impact of today’s media blitz? It has been very hard over the past eight or nine hours to avoid Gordon Brown. He’s gone from one TV or radio studio to another doing a big series of interviews to try to seize back the initiative. But will it have helped in the polls and at the Crewe and Nantwich by election? How will all this be going down with the public….
Is this the first polling move in the post-Ken world? In a number commentaries ahead of the May 1st London mayoral election I questioned whether the telephone pollsters were over-stating Ken’s support because of the way they calculated voting certainty. In fact it was this element that caused me to maintain a big betting position on the Tory even when the phone polling firms had Ken ahead. For it was clear from the turnout history of previous mayoral races that…
Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin is predicting a big announcement tonight. Could it be that John Edwards has come off the fence and is going to endorse Barack? Or could this be the start of something bigger – an Obama-Edwards ticket? The website Political Insider is making a strong case for Edwards who was , of course, the V-P nominee in 2004. We shall see. Mike Smithson
Could Miss Great Britain affect the by election outcome? One of the “other” candidates who might have an impact on Crewe and Nantwich is Gemma Garrett – Miss Great Britain. On the face of it the move seems like a PR stunt designed to boost her profile but, to her credit, she has started to campaign and has already got into a spat with Labour. Gemma says she is about “bringing beauty into politics and turning back the tide of…
Surely it’s time for the curtain to close on the Dimbleby era? Just under a fortnight ago I had a rant about the woeful inadequacies of the BBC’s election coverage and many others have joined the criticism. The antics of Jeremy Vine have been the main focus but these were singled out as an example that something is going badly wrong. Since then we have two more impressive US primary election nights on CNN and the more you see their…
C&N punters mount their own U-turn Yesterday evening, less than two hours after Darling’s commons statement on the tax U-turn I published a chart here under the headline “Darling gives Labour a boost in the Crewe betting“. This has been picked up in the media and on a number of other sites and presented as an instant verdict on what Brown and Darling did yesterday. Well after consideration the markets have returned to almost exactly where they were 24 hours…
But do these final primaries matter at all? After her expected huge victory in the predominantly white working class state of West Virginia Hillary Clinton was in upbeat mood overnight and made it clear that she is still striving to become the next president. This is her biggest victory so far yet the mood of the commentators was that it was irrelevant. Only 28 delegates were at stake, the outcome had been widely predicted, and Obama’s quiet campaign amongst the…
..Or have we passed the game-changing moment? Another Tuesday evening and another primary in the race for the Democratic nomination. This time it’s in West Virginia which decides the fate of 28 delegates. The state’s demographics look good for former First Lady and it’s possible that she could finish up in the 60s with Obama down in the 20s. But will it matter? For it’s beginning to look as though last Tuesday’s North Carolina and Indiana primaries finally closed the…