Archive for March, 2008
March 25, 2008
Carville’s gaffe and revelations about Hillary’s Clinton’s (lack of involvement) in Bosnia push punters towards Obama
After a brief lull, prompted by Wrightgate, the Tom-and-Jerry fight that is the contest for the Democratic nomination resumed with the media blasting Hillary Clinton for her exaggeration of her role in Bosnia and James Carville’s comment comparing Bill Richardson to Judas Iscariot. This has led to Obama’s price moving up to 80 on Intrade. Although both events were hardly the sort of publicity that Team Hillary would have wanted, they aren’t nearly as damaging as ‘Wrightgate’. Of the two, Carville’s loose tongue is the worse since it removes Richardson as a potential Vice-President and will mean that he could go from being merely an endorser of Obama, to a very active and very angry surrogate. I’m still handicapping this contest as 50/50.
Posted in Election 2008 | Tagged barack obama, bill richardson, hillary clinton, james carville | 1 Comment »
March 25, 2008
Bad news for Hillary but dire news for Obama.
My new national projections (last poll ending March 21st) are:
John McCain 48.91
Hillary Clinton 43.02
John McCain 48.92
Barack Obama 41.13
McCain has lead both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. However, McCain leads Clinton by ‘only’ 5.89%, while he has a lead of 7.79% against Obama. Obama has definitely been holed below the water line and if the Democrat superdelegates have any sense they will be thinking about beginning a discreet move toward Hillary Clinton.
Posted in Election 2008 | Tagged barack obama, hillary clinton, john mccain | 2 Comments »
March 22, 2008
McCain leads against both Clinton and Obama.
I have updated my crude projections based on the last five polls (or less – depending on availibility) rolling averages of state head-to-head between Obama/McCain and Clinton/McCain. As I stated previously, these averages include data from 2007, give no weighting to size and will naturally favour the Democrats since they include polls of registered voters and all adults. The electoral college results are (gains from 2004 are in brackets):
John McCain 282 (PA, NH)
Barack Obama 256 (CO, IA, ND, NM, NV)
John McCain 293 (OR, PA, WI, WA)
Hillary Clinton 241 (AR, MO, OH, WV)
(in the case of Clinton/McCain New Hamsphire is a tie)
This seems to signify a shift to John McCain from both the Democrats. Although these are very early and crude figures, I think we will definitely see these figures get worse for the Democrats, especially Obama.
Posted in Election 2008 | Tagged barack obama, hillary clinton, john mccain | 7 Comments »
March 21, 2008
But are the markets going too far?
The odds on Ken Livingstone being re-elected Mayor of London continue to drift out. This raises the interesting question of whether there is value in betting on the current Mayor. Although he is doing badly in the opinion polls, and there are indications that he might not receive the second preferences from the minor candidates that he has been expecting, I believe that he is still in with about a 40% chance. After all, up until now he has had the Lee Jasper scandal to contend with, and Boris Johnson has betting getting some pretty good coverage in the press. However, he will have the Labour machine behind him and as the election approaches the press are going to start to be more critical of Johnson. Personally, I am going to hold off either way until the next polls show if Johnson’s lead in the polls is holding.
Posted in British Politics | Tagged boris johnson, ken livingstone, mayor of london | Leave a Comment »
March 21, 2008
Why Obama’s supporters should not get carried away
It is now pretty certain that Bill Richardson will endorse Barack Obama. The news of this has caused the betting markets to move even more in favour of the Senator from Illinois. However, although Richardson’ endorsement is a notable event, in that both Clinton and Obama sought out his support, it is important not to read too much into it. Firstly, Richardson’s influence is extremely limited given that he had to leave the contest after getting 2% of delegates in Iowa and 5% of the vote in New Hampshire. It must also be remembered that Richardson did a deal with Obama in Iowa over delegates so this wasn’t completely out the blue. Hillary has also received the endorsement of Robert Menendez, with Senator Ken Salazar still undecided, so the impact that this endorsement will have with voters will be limited.
At the same time, neither this nor Pelosi’s insistence that the super-delegates not go against Obama, will have any impact on the ground. Hillary has large leads in Pennsylvania and is closing on Obama in North Carolina, so she still could do well enough to start a move away from Obama. It should be remembered that Pelosi’s endorsement is not particularly influential. Her approval as majority leader is lower than George W Bush’s and she is unpopular within her own party. Contrary to what some may believe, Pelosi also has little or no formal power to force the delegates to vote for Obama. In any case if Obama gets the nomination by virtue of barring Floida and Michigan from re-votes, and by dint of a lot of arm-twisting from Howard Dean and Pelosi (two unpopular figures), it won’t be worth much. Therefore, I am still going to say that Obama and Clinton have a roughly equal chance of becoming the Democratic nominee in 2008.
Posted in Election 2008 | Tagged hillary clinton, barack obama, bill richardson, ken salazar, robert menendez, nancy pelosi | 9 Comments »
March 20, 2008
How should Brown and McCain ensure that the special relationship isn’t affected by party politics?
Today John McCain and Gordon Brown met together and the press accounts seem to imply that it was meaningful, productive and positive. However, it does raise the question as to how McCain and Brown should play the calls from their respective parties to become involved in the politics of their respective countries. McCain is facing a lot of pressure from his own party to be more supportive of the Conservative party. At the same time the friendship between Tony Blair and the Clinton’s was well known. Brown has been anxious to meet Barack Obama, while McCain is going to meet with David Cameron later today. Clearly, my preference, as a longstanding member of the Labour party and someone who has money on McCain, would be for a repeat of 2004 with McCan delivering a few well times snubs to Cameron, but this is clearly unrealistic.
My view is that the best that both parties hope for is that both Brown and McCain stay neutral and that the gestures that they make towards Labour-Democrat and Republican-Conservative unity are so half-hearted that they are snubs. It was clearly inappropriate for Hillary Clinton to be invited to the Labour party conference in 2006 and it was also not very politic for McCain to speak to the Tories. However, the invitation to Hillary was eventually withdrawn and McCain delivered a rousing speech to the blue-rinsed brigade on … pork barrel spending. This was not quite the equivalent of Tony Blair lauding public support for faith schools to Democrats but a snub nonetheless. For his part, McCain has been savvy enough to rig it so that the press see him and Brown talking about the great foreign policy issues of the day, while he talks to Cameron about the things a pro-life war hero can learn from a flip-flopping huckster about public life.
Although there will be those who think that an experienced leader such as Brown should aim to become the ‘agent of change’ and that McCain can learn something from three sucessive election defeats, Brown and McCain both have a clear interest in keeping out of American and British politics. Indeed, the Conservative Party represents pretty much all the reasons why swing voters are moving away from the Democrats. In any case it is not in America’s interest to have someone who considers the special relationship ’slavish’ in Downing Street.
Hopefully Obama and Cameron will make it easy for McCain and Brown to stay neutral with Obama continuing to bash Tony Blair and Britain while Cameron begs to jump on the Obama band-waggon, just as it is becoming obvious that its wheels are coming off. Even the talk on Conservative Home, the Conservative equivalent of Daily Kos, about a planeload of Conservative activists ‘helping’ McCain can easily be dealt with. Indeed, I hear that Alaska has awfully nice weather in the autumn.
Posted in British Politics, Election 2008 | Tagged barack obama, david cameron, hillary clinton, john mccain | Leave a Comment »
March 20, 2008
Bad news for the Senator from Illinois
I’ve come up with the following projections for North Carolina.
Barack Obama 44.53
Hillary Clinton 42.77
Obama’s lead has never been that large, but if Clinton beats him in North Carolina, which was supposed to be a state that he would easily win, Obama will definitely be on the ropes.
Posted in Election 2008 | Tagged barack obama, hillary clinton, north carolina | Leave a Comment »
March 19, 2008
Bad news for Hillary but worse news for Obama.
My new national projections (last poll ending March 16th) are:
John McCain 47.67
Hillary Clinton 43.25
John McCain 47.78
Barack Obama 42.98
McCain has clear leads of 4.80% and 4.42% against Obama and Clinton respectively. However, Clinton does nearly as badly as Barack Obaa, indicating that both have been damaged by Jeremiah Wright. Indeed, I firmly believe that the revelations of the past week are going to resonate beyond this election.
Posted in Election 2008 | Tagged barack obama, head-to-head, hillary clinton, john mccain | 8 Comments »
March 19, 2008
Clinton’s lead surges in the wake of Jeremiah Wright.
Adding the PPP poll to the collection of Pennsylvania polls, I’ve come up with the following projections.
Hillary Clinton 53.79
Barack Obama 37.53
The gap is till less than it was immediately after Texas and Ohio. However, the PPP poll, which was conducted on the 15th and 16th (the other poll was conducted over a seven day period), showed a 26 point Clinton lead, so we can probably expect the next round of polling to favour Clinton even more. Although Obama’s speech was better than I initially thought, he doesn’t understand that the 9/11 and ‘GDA’ comments that Wright made really undermine his credibility as a potential Commander-in-Chief.
Posted in Election 2008 | Tagged barack obama, hillary clinton, pennsylvania | 3 Comments »
March 19, 2008
I have decided to moderate all comments. This site is a hobby of mine, not a full time job, so I will check my email twice every day.
Posted in Misc | Leave a Comment »
March 18, 2008
His speech might have helped him but Obama’s chances are still damaged.
My initial view about Obama’s speech was that it was insubstantial and poorly delivered and that if it would succeed it would be because was, like a good stage hypnotist, Obama’s team has managed to hype it up so much that it acquired a momentum irrespective of its actual quality. However, after reading the reaction on even conservative web-logs, it seems to have been a good speech for Obama in that it staunched the wound, got ahead of any revelations that would proved him to be a liar, and reframed this as a debate about race, rather than one about patriotism and respect for the voters. However, Obama’s admission that he did attend some of Wright’s more ‘controversial’ sermons will definitely hurt him.
Ironically, as one poster on RedState pointed out, the speech that it most closely parallels was Bill Clinton’s speech about the Monica Lewinsky scandal, in that Clinton was able to turn the scandal into a referendum on the Republican reaction, but at the expense of destroying Gore’s chances of victory. In essence, Obama has partially dodged this bullet, in that his candidacy has not been completely destroyed, but Wright’s comments about September 11 will haunt the Democrats in the same way that Kerry’s ‘joke’ about troops has hurt his standing in Massachusetts. Indeed, voters in the Empire State may wonder why their Senator, who had been previously prepared to attack Obama, was not prepared to stand up for the victims of 9/11. However, I am still going to give him a 50% chance of being the nominee and a 15% chance of winning the election if he is nominated. He might not be completely toast (but I do stress the world completely), but he still has very little chance of moving to Pennsylvania Avenue. I stand by my assertion that McCain has a chance to put New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey in play if Obama is the nominee.
Posted in Election 2008 | Tagged barack obama, hillary clinton, jeremiah wright, john mccain, new york | 3 Comments »
March 18, 2008
Barack Obama narrows the gap a little bit
Adding the latest poll to the collection of Pennsylvania polls, I’ve come up with the following projections.
Hillary Clinton 52.85
Barack Obama 40.71
Obama has close the gap a little bit, but he is still over 12% behind in a key bellweather state. He is in serious trouble there, but Clinton seems to be having some trouble getting the 15% margin she needs to finish him off.
Posted in Election 2008 | Tagged barack obama, hillary clinton, pennsylvania | Leave a Comment »
March 18, 2008
Things are still bad for Labour but there is a slight improvement
Adding the latest ICM poll to my collection and filtering it produces the following projections:
Conservatives 42.11 (355)
Labour 28.76 (222)
Liberal Democrats 20.38 (43)
As a point of reference, popular alternatives produce the following; (Poll of polls) Con 39.8 Lab 32.6 LDm 18 (5 Poll Rolling Average) Con 40.4 Lab 30.8 LDm 18.4. Although the situation is still dire, things are just a little bit better.
Posted in British Politics | Tagged conservatives, icm, labour, liberal democrats | Leave a Comment »
March 17, 2008
Some very good news for Johnson.
My projections for the Mayor of London first preferences are:
Boris Johnson 48.89
Ken Livingstone 37.04
Brian Paddick 12
Boris Johnson has a clear lead, more than justifying his current price. However, because of the nature of this contest (which uses IRV/STV) it is impossible to rule Ken Livingstone out completely.
Posted in British Politics | Tagged boris johnson, ken livingstone | Leave a Comment »
March 17, 2008
The financial crisis is a prime moment for McCain to showcase his populist credentials, while solidifying his support with the base.
The Bear Stearns bailout presents a strong opportunity for McCain to show off his credentials on economic matters. The conventional wisdom is that McCain should support the action of the Federal Reserve in bailing Bear Stearns out. However, I believe that McCain should not only oppose any further bailouts but he should lead the charge against the actions of the Federal Reserve. Although he should make it clear that he supports a general loosening of monetary policy, he should make it clear that, just as the government cannot subsidise manufacturing jobs in the auto and textile industries, taxpayers’s money should not be used to shield businesses from the consequences of their decisions. He should clearly and unapologetically stress that such policies are an affront to fiscal discipline and will create huge moral risks.
At the same time McCain should suggest that such funds should be diverted into solving the long-term structural problems of the American economy. For instance, he could introduce legislation in the Senate that would divert such funds into re-training programmes for displaced workers or to expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit. This sort of action would be risky but, like his crusade on pork barrel spending, win him support from both the Republican base but also those on the centre-left. After all, McCain’s opposition to the post 9/11 bailout of the airplane industry didn’t lose him any support. At worst McCain can argue that he alone is prepared to tell some ‘hard truths’.
What do you think? Please leave your comments below.
Posted in Election 2008 | Tagged bear stearns, john mccain | 1 Comment »
