London: Swing to Labour drops as Greens pick up left-wing Labour votes.

London at election 2010

I have decided that I am going to go under the microscope and take a deeper look at what is happening in the capital. The General Election is only 5 months away, and the capital is going to be a key battleground, where Ed Miliband needs to do well if he is to get a majority and become Prime Minister. For the purposes of this examination, I shall be using YouGov regional extrapolations, from the 1st-10th of December, calculating the swing toward or against Labour since 2010, and showing how this would impact on how many seats Labour is set to gain in London. Firstly, here are the Labour target seats:

And, here are the regional extrapolation figures from 1st-10th December: Sources for extrapolations can be found here.

                                          Lab 36.2%, Con 34.4%, LD 8.4%, UKIP 11

The findings came as quite a surprise to me, as the extrapolation suggested that there has been no swing at all to Labour in London since the last election. On this kind of result, only the 3 Liberal Democrat seats and maybe Hendon would fall to Labour, and all of the rest of the marginal seats would remain held by the Conservative Party. As early as this May, Labour was polling at 40% plus in London, and surveys from a few months ago indicated that there was a huge swing to Labour in London. What is the reason for the sudden collapse?

I did some digging, and pretty quickly discovered the reason. The Green Party has eaten substantially into the Labour Party support in London, and is polling at 8-9%, slightly higher than it is nationally. The Greens have picked up some of the left-wing liberal democrats who defected to Labour earlier in the parliament but are now slowly drifting away. My suspicion is that the party knows that this has been happening, slowly but surely, as they have appointed a London MP, Sadiq Khan, as head of the Labour taskforce on how to deal with the Green Party. Labour must persuade these voters to lend their votes to the party for the general election. If they do not, the prospect of a Labour majority government becomes very unlikely.

Labour lead at 2: Labour 34%, Conservatives 32%, UKIP 17%, LD 7%, Green 6%

The Labour Party has a lead of 2% in this week's poll of polls, a 1% increase from last week. The Tories are down 1%, UKIP hold steady, the Lib Dems shed one point and the Greens climb one point to 6%.

The slightly larger lead may be as a result of the Rochester and Strood by-election, in which David Cameron's party suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Mark Reckless and UKIP. Regional extrapolations from YouGov will be out in the next few days in my post on Agora.

On a uniform national swing, this would lead to a Labour Majority of 24. Considering Labour's collapse in Scotland, however, the actual result would have Labour on around 290 seats, around 30 seats ahead of the Tories, but possibly unable to form a stable government.

However, a battlebus/comres marginal poll this week showed that Labour is continuing to do much better in the marginals than it is nationally,giving Labour an 8% lead in marginal seats. Lord Ashcroft's poll of the Tory-Lib Dem battleground also shows that the Tories will struggle to pick up more than a small number of Lib Dem held seats. The same poll also shows that Nigel Farage trails his Tory opponent by 5% in Thanet South, and will have to work hard to win that seat.

All in all, nothing remains certain at this stage, and everything could change. The autumn statement is this Wednesday, and we will see whether or not it causes any large scale changes in public opinion.

Labour lead at 1: Labour 34%, Conservatives 33%, UKIP 17%, Lib Dems 8%, Greens 5%

The Labour Party retains a small 1% lead in this week's poll of polls. Labour, the Tories, and UKIP are all up very slightly from last week's poll, the Lib Dems and Greens are holding steady on 8% and 5% respectively, whilst the share for parties other than these 5 has dropped by 3%.

The situation remains largely the same as it has done for the last few weeks, with Labour retaining a narrow lead, UKIP someway behind in 3rd, and the Lib Dems and Greens grapple for 4th place.

A note of caution about the Green Party surge. The Greens polled 0.8% in 2010 and managed to win 1 seat. To poll at 5% is very good news for them and confirms that they have, to some extent, "Surged." However this does not make it likely that they will win another seat at the general election next year, as their vote is too thinly spread, which is not a good way to win FPTP seats. The same goes for UKIP, which has an upper ceiling of around 20 seats on its current level of support. Up until UKIP get 25% of the vote, or until they surpass one of the two main parties in support, winning more than 20 seats is not possible for them. There comes a tipping point, up until which UKIP does not win many seats, and after which it starts to win many seats at once. That tipping point is when they manage to get 25% or more of  the vote.

A word about "Thornyberry gate"

Labour did very poorly in the Rochester and Strood by-election, but its misery was compounded by the fact that its shadow atourney general, Emily Thornberry, was forced to resign after posting a tweet which many people regarded as being offensive. The tweet was of a house owned by a working class man, with an England flag and a white van, labelled "Tweet from Rochester". The tweet itself was not offensive, but the implication behind it offended people: after all, what is unusual about working class patriotism? Thornberry apologised and resigned, but the damage had been done, and "Thornberry gate" was all over the Sun newspaper the next day, giving Sky News and the Tory media the excuse to talk about something other than Cameron's embarrassment in Rochester.

My recommendation to the party would be to be very careful about what its elected representatives post on twitter during the election campaign. Miliband must run a sleek and professional campaign with no gaffs to ensure that the hostile press cannot make scandals out of little things. Can he do it? Only 6 months are left.

What did Tuesday's US elections tell us about the US Presidential Election in 2016?

So. The GOP have taken control of the US Senate in a landslide win, and have increased their majority in the House of Representatives, as well as winning a large number of Gubernatorial and Local elections. What does this actually mean looking forward to the United States Presidential Election in 2016?

Well, for starters, it is clear that Barrack Obama is going to be a lame duck for the last two years of his office. Previously, he had control of the Senate, and so he could, to some extent, claim legitimacy and could get laws passed with some difficulty. Now, getting any sort of law pushed through the legislatures will require the consent of both House Republicans and Republicans in the Senate.  And, judging by what Mitch McConnell said in 2012, that he wanted Barrack Obama to be a one term president and was determined to block the president's policies, the GOP seem to be in no mood to co-operate.

It should be seen as quite significant that Rand Paul was celebrating with Mcconnell. Paul, according to polls, is by far the most popular Republican with the American electorate, and so he has a real chance of winning any presidential election. Indeed, Paul played a significant role in the Republican campaign, as did Hilary Clinton for the Democratic Party. What chance would he, as the most able Republican candidate, have at a US Presidential election?

Well, according to yesterday's election, he would have quite a good chance of winning. The Republicans polled at 51% nationally whilst the Democrats managed to get 48% of the vote, which is a swing from the Democrats to the Republicans of 7%. The party managed to win notable bellweather states, such as Florida, and came close in Virginia, which was a major shock to the Democrats, in a seat that has always traditionally been a Blue Heartland. If the swing shown on Tuesday was repeated at a US Presidential Election nationwide, Rand Paul would be the President of the United States with a powerful total of 358 Electoral College Votes, compared to 180 for whoever his Democratic Party challenger would be.

However, we should be rather cautious about reading too much into these results and extrapolating them to a US Presidential Election. In 2016, President Obama will not be on the ballot paper. The President has become deeply unpopular due to the dysfunctional nature of the US Government at the moment, and so has been punished for it. Indeed, many Republicans tried to make the elections a referendum on his presidency, and many Democrats distanced themselves from him during the campaign.

Now that the GOP have control of the Senate and House, however, the Democratic Party will be able to blame them rather than the president if governance continues to be done as poorly as it has been done for the last few years. This will automatically hand a massive advantage to the Democrats at the Presidential Election. The second major thing to take into account is the nature of people who vote at US General Elections, as they tend to be white, much older than the median, highly educated and well-paid. The traditional Democratic caucus-Young people, ethnic minorities, liberal lower middle class earners, latinos, black Americans, etc, do not really turn up, and they did not turn up yesterday for the election. These people can be guaranteed to turn up in much larger numbers at a US Presidential Election.

So, to conclude, this election was bad for Obama and the Democrats, but it is not the disaster that many think that it is. With less than 2 years now to go until Obama steps down and hands power to his successor, there is still everything to play for in America and American politics.

Only 5 months to go until the EU elections.... The elections which nobody seems to want to win.

Only 5 months are left until the 2014 European Elections, and despite their being much public interest, politicians and the media have been completely silent. Why is this? One major reason could be because this election represents a huge opportunity for the insurgent party of British politics, UKIP. It is important to remember that many of the major media outlets are controlled by Conservative supporting conglomerates. Kenneth Clarke made the mistake of calling UKIP supporters "Clowns and fruitcakes" back in May, which led to the UKIP surge, hence why the media has been unusually hushed ever since then about UKIP, except when it reports controversial stuff about the party. UKIP have won 12 Council seats and gotten 24% of the vote in Local By-Elections since May 2013, and are shown to be in first place in many parliamentary constituencies as well. Since they came from nowhere to clinch 2nd in 2009, you would expect that as being a right of centre opposition party, they could come 1st in May next year because of a Tory collapse. Indeed, the bookies have UKIP as favourites for winning. However, opinion polls suggest that this is not (Yet) the case. The most recent EU election poll by survation had Labour on 32%, with a 7% lead over UKIP on 25%, the Conservatives on 24%, and the Lib Dems on 8%. Under these results, Labour would win the EU elections, being the largest party (29 seats) by 5 seats, whilst UKIP will make big gains (24 seats) but remain where they are- 2nd. The Tories would be battered (11 seats) and the Lib Dems would also suffer serious damage (4 seats) This would be a disappointment for UKIP and Farage, as the Labour Party policy on immigration is not particularly popular even with Labour voters, and these are the people Farage must convince if he is to win these elections. These are a set of elections where the Red team has always struggled to get its supporters interested enough to get out and vote, and indeed Labour have never topped the poll since the D'Hondt electoral system was introduced. It is vital for Farage to win these elections- A win here would make it absolutely inconceivable for Farage to not feature in the 2015 General Election TV debates. It would also cause panic and perhaps defections within the Conservative Party, which would help Farage even more. So, for now at least, the UKIP surge flatters to deceive.