Could we be heading for a messy post-election row? With tomorrow’s vital Texas primary attracting a lot of betting interest and with the result looking as though it is on a knife-edge there’s a chance that we might see a huge betting row over who actually “wins” the state. For the contender who wins the most votes in the main election might end up with significantly fewer delegates because of the complicated rules This is because of the two stage…
With 65% after 20% counted, even 1.01 would have been a value bet Medvedev will be youngest President, may win all 84 regions of the Federation Now that voting has closed in Kaliningrad Oblast, the westernmost region of the Russian Federation’s 11 time zones, the exit polls have unsurprisingly proclaimed Dmitry Medvedev the winner by a landslide. Communist candidate Zyuganov is currently just below 20%, while Vladimir Zhirinovsky is at 12.5%. Medvedev’s current vote share is some six points below…
What Will London Tell Us About the Next General Election? Mike Smithson has written several excellent articles about the London Mayoralty this week, and I do not propose to add to them directly. My intention is to explore what the outcome will tell us about the next general election. Electoral history over the past 40 years suggests that the outcome of the London Mayoralty will be a good pointer to the outcome of the next election. London is politically volatile….
Were the results of a secret poll behind the Boris betting rush? Yesterday afternoon, while Labour was gathered in Birmingham for its spring conference, there was a big switch-over on the mayoral betting markets that now make Boris the odds-on favourite. For the talk at the conference was of Ken facing a major challenge suggesting to me that there might be another secret poll which they are keeping very quiet about. Tessa Jowell’s assertion that the “race this time is…
As the chart, reflecting betting prices as implied probabilities, shows there has been an easing of Ken’s Mayoral election price and a tightening of Boris’s and most of this has happened in the past 36 hours. I don’t know what’s driving it. The last major news items were the opinion polls on Tuesday. On the Sporting Index spread market Boris has this morning been priced as the clear favourite. My only explanation is that Labour is holding its Spring Conference…
But voters think the Speaker, Michael Martin, should resign The February survey by YouGov for the Daily Telegraph this morning suggests that public opinion is remaining pretty stable with hardly any movement on the last poll from the firm ten days ago. The figures with changes on the last survey from the poll ten days ago are: CON 40% (nc): LAB 33% (-1): LD 16% (nc) The figures mean that in every singly YouGov survey since Brown’s October U-turn over…
But has it come too late? It has echoes, as one or two posters have suggested, of this brilliant ad by LBJ in 1964 when he was running against Barry Goldwater. UPDATE 1615 GMT. The Obama campaign have wasted no time in responding by getting this ad out – all within just over an hour. Democratic nomination betting is here. Mike Smithson
What do we think of their new £500k campaign? In almost all the national papers this morning there are large ads from the Conservatives which are aimed, it seems. at building up a supporter base rather than winning votes. There’s a different theme in every newspaper but the objective appears to be the same – “Join us at Conservatives.com”. The message in the Times is about economic competence, green issues get singled out for special attention in the Independent while…