Senate 2022: Pennsylvania, a truly Purple State
I should state upfront I’m not as confident of the tip at the end of this article than normal. I’ve written before about the GOP’s apparently weak candidates for many winnable Senate seats, and the prospect of that helping the Democrats hold on to a New Hampshire Senate seat. But how about Pennsylvania, where candidates will be selected next week? Even more than New Hampshire, this is a genuinely purple state. Won by Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020….
Starmer can become PM without LAB making a single gain
One of the features of the next general election is that the seat targets for Labour and Tories will be totally different because Johnson’s party would find it very hard to form a coalition in the event of falling below the 325 seats required for a majority. One of the challenges for LAB is that since the loss of Scotland at GE2015 it is very difficult to see how Starmer’s party can achieve a majority. Last time they came out…
Hunt makes a leadership move that he says is not a move
The main story on the front page of The Times this morning is a piece about Jeremy Hunt who was the health secretary in Theresa May’s government and of course, was the one who reached the final two in the leadership election 3 years ago. Unlike colleagues at Westminster who are ministers, Hunt is in a much better position to take initiatives like this one and he must be pleased about the way the Times is covering it this morning….
Putting two fingers up to Biden on Ulster is a big gamble
One thing that I don’t think Johnson and team don’t fully appreciate is the big role Joe Biden and other US politicians played in the Anglo-Iriish agreement in the late 1990s which just about stopped decades of the “troubles” in Ireland. It all might seem a long time ago. The changes announced this afternoon have the UK breaking the international treaty which brought sought to bring peace to Ireland. The UK will have few friends in taking this action. Biden…
The Ashfield MP’s comments on the poor will be remembered
This was a CON GE2019 gain on 39% of the vote Anderson’s comment in the Commons on the cookery skills of poor people are getting a lot of negative coverage in the media and I really wonder if he will later see this as a gaffe that cost him his political career. His observations to fellow MPs are surely going to be used against him in what had traditionally been a tight LAB-CON marginal. At GE2017 the LAB majority was…
2 months after Rishi collapsed the CON leader market is static
One thing that really boosts Johnson in his current position is that there is no obvious person there to replace him as we see from the betting chart above. This of course all changed with the massive decline of the Sunak in March and since then no one has really emerged to perhaps take his place. As can be seen in the betting there are 5 contenders who are rated as having an 8% or greater chance of becoming the…