Sunak surges and Starmer slips Quite what is driving the betting is hard to say but Chancellor Sunak has moved sharply and as I write (2100 BST) is only 1% behind the LAB leader. Of course everything in this market depends on whether there is a change of Prime Minister before the general election or afterwards. For it is hard to see Sir Keir Starmer getting the job without securing enough MPs – and the only development that can do…
Michigan 16 Electoral College votes Wisconsin 10 Electoral College votes Pennsylvania – 20 Electoral College votes We are now just two months away from the US Presidential elections and rather than focus on national polling I thought it would be useful to review every so often how things are going in the key swing states that the Democrats need to win in order to unseat Trump in November. We all know each state is a separate battleground with couple of…
There’s a new ABC News/Ipsos WH2020 poll out with its first leadership ratings since the end of the conventions. As can be seen above Biden has moved 46% favourable in the latest poll which is up 6% over three weeks ago. He’s also seen his unfavourable numbers decline. Trump has gone the other way. He’s slipped from 35% favourable three weeks ago to 30% in this latest poll. His unfavourable ratings have remained pretty constant. I regard leader ratings as…
In the past week there’s been some astonishing revelations about Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, some of which I covered last week, but for me the most fascinating was this revelation by The HuffPost’s revelations that Jeremy Corbyn’s office ordered that a raft of “moderate” Labour MPs should be stripped of extra campaign funding in the 2017 general election, a senior former party official has revealed. Patrick Heneghan, who was executive director for elections and campaigns, said that he was asked to…
How Covid-Alert are you? Or, put another way, without checking, can you tell me what the current Covid Alert Level is? And without checking, can you tell me what that alert level means? I expect that most of you will have proven unalert by that measure.* It was supposed to be a touchstone measure. When Boris Johnson addressed the nation on 10 May, the introduction of the Covid Alert Level System was his central point. Let me remind you of his words: “And to chart our…
This battle is far from over We are just starting to see serious analysis of the Trump campaign following his party’s virtual convention this week. The New York Times had this key observation of the Trump campaign approach: The Republican convention this week marked an extraordinary effort to recast President Trump’s image on issues of race and gender, with the party stretching to find African-Americans who would testify that Mr. Trump is not racist, and lining up women to describe…
The phantom recession is about to get real Panic might be too strong a word but the urgency with which ministers and business leaders have called this week for people to return to working in offices and city centres suggests that they’re seriously concerned, and rightly so. Economies are ecosystems and Covid-19 has trampled through Britain’s like a bulldozer through a meadow. A study for Sky News last week found that in early August, worker footfall in cities was just…
Given that elections at this stage are all about metrics of one form or another we now have the TV audience figures for Trump’s speech overnight which we can compare with Biden’s and the numbers give the Democrat the edge. This is how CNN is reporting it: President Trump’s Thursday night convention speech making the case for his reelection was lower-rated than his challenger Joe Biden’s speech one week ago, according to overnight Nielsen ratings. About 21.6 million viewers watched…