Normally incumbent Presidents don’t face a serious challenge when they seek re-election but next year things could be very different because Biden is so old. So far all the messages from the Biden camp are that he does plan to stand again even though he could be in his late 80s when his second term of office finally came to an end. I just wonder whether he could be facing a contested primary with one or two young challengers seeking…
If the Tories want to relive the Truss premiership and having polling showing them finishing fifth in a general election after the Labour party , the SNP, the Lib Dems, and the Natural Law party then ending the triple lock might be the best way to go about it. I am surprised to see younger voters to be pro triple lock given the way that generation has been treated recently but I suppose they will be pensioners one day. Based…
Will Labour win a majority at the next election? One potential barrier that has been much cited here is the party’s poor performance in 2019, which means that it faces a steep climb to win a majority. But others have argued that we should be thinking of its challenge not in terms of the additional seats it needs to gain, but the absolute number of seats it needs to win (326, although de facto fewer). To formalise the discussion, suppose…
. First up is Rutherglen where punters have LAB as strong odds-on favourite to beat the SNP Then a fortnight later on October 19th we have Mid Beds and Tamworth – both seats held by the Tories at GE2019 with big majorities. Could it be that Labour is able to make two gains on the same day. to follow up its likely success in Scotland. Winning two on the same day us something that seemed highly likely in the Uxbridge…
With Labour looking to want maybe least 25 gains from the SNP in Scotland to help it towards an overall majority there’s a new poll from YouGov. This has the party’s deficit there up 7%. This is disappointing for Starmer and the question is whether other pollsters in their Scottish polls find similar trends. We don’t often dwell on it but the challenge facing LAB at the election is absolutely massive if it wants to achieve an overall majority. The…
“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.” (Orwell -1946) The last 2 days have given us 2 examples of how language is used to obscure the indefensible. But not from the political world. For a change. Example No 1 The announcement by BP that its CEO, Bernard Looney, left because, when providing answers in an earlier investigation about his relationships with colleagues, “he now accepts that he was not fully transparent in his previous…
Starmer should be sceptical of big leads On the face of it the latest Wikipedia polling table is very good for LAB and the party is heading for a landslide whenever the election is called The only problem is that there is a very large group of voters who went with the Tories in 2019 who continue to say don’t know. Most pollsters simply do not include them. According to the latest YouGov 23% of Conservative voters at the last…
This is just a quickie but I am hearing a fair bit from Mid-Beds that a name that keeps on coming up on the doorstep is the chairman of Central Bedfordshire Council, Gareth Mackey. .He’s an independent councillor, who has announced he would stand as an independent, having previously said he would run in the constituency at the General Election. He’s clearly got a lot of name recognition in the parts of the seat that are covered by the Central Beds…