I recently looked at Labour/Lib Dem tactical voting since 1983 and noted that the analysis didn’t work quite so well for 1997. In 1997, the Lib Dems won 46 seats. This was up 26 on their total of 20 in 1992 and was achieved despite their share of the GB vote falling by 1.2 percentage points (pp). To what extent was this made possible by tactical voting? Boundary changes for the 1997 general election make this a little tricky to…
The story for the PM that won’t go away One of the must reads in the Sunday papers look set to be the above in the Sunday Times and raises huge questions over why Johnson overruled advisors and insisted that Lebedev be made a member of the House of Lords. Of course that was before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine which has has had a huge impact on East-West relations. This could be problematic for the PM with his party and…
Back in 2020 there was a lot of pre-election excitement about Texas flipping blue. But on election day and onwards the attention turned to events in Georgia. Democrats hadn’t come within 5% of winning the state since the Clinton era (won in ’92, just lost in ’96) but Democrats won it by the narrowest of margins. Then, after both senate seats went to run-offs, they flipped them both too. The reason was widely held to have been, in no small…
For almost the last three months I have been saying that Starmer for next PM is one of the better political bets at the moment. He’s currently a 14% chance on Betfair which has moved up a fair bit since the 8-9% betting chance he was on in January when the narrative was that Johnson would be booted out. I suggested then that Tory MPs didn’t have the bottle or numbers to try to oust him. What is really remarkable…
Exactly a month today will be the first round of voting in the French presidential election in which currently the incumbent, Emmanuel Macron, is the strong favorite with Marie Le Penn in second place. The 12 candidates who have satisfied the nomination threshold will be on the ballot on April 10th and the top two go into the second round of voting two weeks later. The widespread expectation had been that the final runoff would be the same as 2017…
The only betting I can find that links to the Ukraine crisis is on the Smarkets betting exchange on whether Putin will still be Russian president on May 1st. He has certainly taken a massive gamble with his decision to invade Ukraine and as the death toll rises on both sides the question is how does this all end? NATO is being very guarded about it getting involved because there must be a risk that if Putin is pushed too…
It is almost hard to credit it now but barely two months ago Chancellor Sunak looked relatively certain to be the next prime minister and the betting he money was on a change at Number 10 taking place during this year. How that different that appears now as Johnson’s ratings rise in response to his steady performance over Ukraine and his growing confidence. He certainly is having a good war as they say. Sunak’s big chance was in ‘January when…