JUST IN: Vice Pres. Kamala Harris has 49% support among likely voters and former Pres. Donald Trump has 46%, according to final-weekend @ABC News/Ipsos poll.
The new Tory leader takes charge with a tepid endorsement from her party’s members, two-thirds of her parliamentary colleagues preferring someone else and prominent names declaring that they have no desire to serve in her shadow cabinet.
In her acceptance speech, she described the task ahead as “tough”, which is an understatement. The July election was the worst result for the Conservative party, both in terms of vote share and seats won, since 1832. I am not among those who think this means the Tories can never recover. They have been pronounced dead and buried in the past only then to rise from the grave. But they are unlikely to start recovering until – and unless – they have an honest reckoning with themselves about their multiple failings in government.
Surveys suggest that very few voters think the Conservatives lost the election because they were too left wing while the majority of those with an opinion put it down to their incompetence.
One of the biggest challenges for the new leader of the opposition, and especially when the Tory parliamentary presence is so small, will be persuading voters to pay them any heed. The case made for Mrs Badenoch by her promoters is that she is “box office” with a gift for grabbing attention. What she has often failed to grasp is that there is such a thing as the wrong kind of attention. “Still in development” is the assessment of one reasonably sympathetic senior Tory.
Conservatives have displayed next to no interest in atoning for all the things voters came to loathe about them. There has never been a comprehensive repudiation of Boris Johnson for debauching standards in public life. Nor has there been an expression of suitably abject contrition for Liz Truss’s calamitous experiment with the economy. Nor have senior Tories had the humility to acknowledge that they left a super-massive black hole in the Treasury’s books. When you have fouled up as badly and as repeatedly as the Conservatives did in government, the first step to redemption with the electorate is to own your blunders and express regret for them.
Even if voters become persistently discontented with Sir Keir’s government, the Tories are delusional if they imagine that this means the public will simply collapse back into their embrace and tell the Conservatives all is forgiven. Not least because so far the Tories have been almost completely incapable of recognising how much forgiveness they will need before they are taken seriously again. If Kemi Badenoch wants to get a hearing from the British people, she is first going to have to say sorry. And she is going to have to say it a lot.
I think this is why Badenoch was the better choice. Jenrick was continuity sleaze.
Kemi's victory speech was clear that big mistakes were made by the Tories in office and that they need to have a long hard look at themselves.
Her musings in the past that WFP should be scrapped (which she rowed back on when it became Labour policy) and on Maternity pay being too generous shows a real willingness to make deep cuts to welfare and pensions in order to move to a low tax country.
I wonder if she has the courage to scrap the Triple Lock. She just might.
Badenoch’s weakness is that she is very tribal, aggressively so. The most successful politicians have the ability to look over the party horizon and sympathise without and understand voters that make other choices. She shares Corbyns disdain for the opposition. Evangelical self righteousness makes big tent politics far harder.
Kemi is more agnostic Catholic than evangelical. Her husband Hamish is Roman Catholic.
“My mother’s father. My paternal grandmother was a Muslim, though to be fair she did convert in later life. My family’s sort of Anglican and Methodist. My maternal grandfather was a Methodist reverend.”
ConHome: “And where did he practice?”
Badenoch: “In Nigeria. I was born here [in Wimbledon], but I call myself first generation, because I grew up in Nigeria and I chose to come back here. So I’m agnostic really, but I was brought up with cultural Christian values.”
ConHome: “Have you had your children baptised?”
Badenoch: “Yes, because I’m married to a Catholic [she and Hamish Badenoch, whose mother emigrated from Ireland, have two children].”
ConHome: “They’re being brought up as Catholics, are they?”
Nominal Roman Catholic, with Anglican quantities of Fudge.
This is interesting:
My paternal grandmother was a Muslim, though to be fair she did convert in later life. My family’s sort of Anglican and Methodist. My maternal grandfather was a Methodist reverend.
Both her parents were Yoruba, which is (roughly or in part - open to correction on details) a tribe which went from traditional African to part Muslim, predominantly Christian, is mainly urban, was on the winning side in the Biafran War, and in the past was active as slavers.
Fascinating mix.
My experiences are also with Yoruba. They tend to be the educated middle classes who come to the UK on highly skilled/educated visas.
Yes - her parents' professions are both educated middle class (though I'm not sure on exact societal positioning in Nigeria by a UK comparison) - GP and University Professor.
Kemi Badenoch tells @bbclaurak that Boris Johnson was a "great" prime minister and partygate was "overblown".
Badenoch's interview on Kuenssberg was very interesting and she is quite impressive
I think she may well surprise her opponents, even confound them
I would suggest it would be foolhardy to underestimate her
Good to see you on board. I think she is in principle okay, but Cleverly would have moved the dial very much more in your favour.
It is the first time I have heard her interviewed, and she was confident and very much pro business and anti big government which is a breath of fresh air from some previous conservatives
She needs to get a grip on facts though. It has taken her less than 24 hours to make her first blunder. The increase in Employer NICs will NOT be levied on the NHS. She really should have known that.
But it’s true Kemi Badenoch’s famed laziness could be her Achilles Heel now she’s much more in the spotlight.
You could argue LOTO have pretty much nothing to actually do, apart from get out of bed Wednesday mornings and not turn up at cenotaph in Donkey Jacket. But truth is, LOTO have to be spot on in what they are saying in every media appearance and PMQ. And my experience lazy people are lazy people, and you can never ever change them in their lives. It’s who they are.
Poor old Michael Foot. Turned up at the Cenotaph forty years ago in a British Warm Coat, presented to him by admirer, allegedly, and it's been misrepresented by the Right ever since!
Political folklore, almost metaphor and allegory - like tanks on the lawn, winter of discontent, beer and sandwiches at number 10.
It was actually Lord Ali’s Great Uncle who gave Foot the coat, if you want a 110% true fact.
IIRC correctly the Queen Mother remarked on how sensible it was!
Harris slight advantage in that particular poll, as she wins if she gets the states she's ahead in. Trump would have to win both tied states plus Georgia or NC.
Everyone in America has an aunt like Ann Selzer and an uncle like Nate Silver. Nate talks loudly all night long until Ann chimes in with a totally brilliant point to undermine him. (Also, Nate talks with his mouth full and Ann made all the desserts)
JUST IN: Vice Pres. Kamala Harris has 49% support among likely voters and former Pres. Donald Trump has 46%, according to final-weekend @ABC News/Ipsos poll.
Kemi Badenoch tells @bbclaurak that Boris Johnson was a "great" prime minister and partygate was "overblown".
Badenoch's interview on Kuenssberg was very interesting and she is quite impressive
I think she may well surprise her opponents, even confound them
I would suggest it would be foolhardy to underestimate her
Good to see you on board. I think she is in principle okay, but Cleverly would have moved the dial very much more in your favour.
It is the first time I have heard her interviewed, and she was confident and very much pro business and anti big government which is a breath of fresh air from some previous conservatives
She needs to get a grip on facts though. It has taken her less than 24 hours to make her first blunder. The increase in Employer NICs will NOT be levied on the NHS. She really should have known that.
But it’s true Kemi Badenoch’s famed laziness could be her Achilles Heel now she’s much more in the spotlight.
You could argue LOTO have pretty much nothing to actually do, apart from get out of bed Wednesday mornings and not turn up at cenotaph in Donkey Jacket. But truth is, LOTO have to be spot on in what they are saying in every media appearance and PMQ. And my experience lazy people are lazy people, and you can never ever change them in their lives. It’s who they are.
Poor old Michael Foot. Turned up at the Cenotaph forty years ago in a British Warm Coat, presented to him by admirer, allegedly, and it's been misrepresented by the Right ever since!
Political folklore, almost metaphor and allegory - like tanks on the lawn, winter of discontent, beer and sandwiches at number 10.
It was actually Lord Ali’s Great Uncle who gave Foot the coat, if you want a 110% true fact.
So what you're saying is that Labour leaders being unable to dress themselves and taking clothes off others is a tradition that predates Starmer by decades?
So if there are serious signs of a move to Harris, will Trump have a serious talk with his advisers about toning it down and looking presidential for the next couple of days or b) GO FULL TONTO?
You have to ask? Would a man capable of a) have done...well, pretty much anything he does?
He does cheat on his wives, which is pretty presidential behaviour admittedly.
'Ok sir, but could we cut down on the mock fellatio on mics stuff?'
The dark heart of Scottish Nationalism rears its ugly head once again, like all demagogues they go after the lawyers.
Humza Yousaf, the former first minister in Scotland, has apologised to a senior barrister for referring to him as a "Tory f*ckwit".
Yousaf used the slur against Roddy Dunlop KC, the Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, in a WhatsApp conversation, which was released following of Freedom of Information request by a member of the public.
Yousaf, who was health secretary at the time, had been been exchanging messages during the pandemic with Professor Leitch, who was the then Scottish government's national clinical director.
In one exchange in May 2021, the senior SNP minister wrote to Leitch saying: "Dunlop is a Tory f*ckwit. Remember Twitter isn't real life!".
The exact context is slightly murky, as some messages were redacted. But it seems to relate to a Twitter spat between Dunlop and Professor Leitch during the pandemic, over the merits of holding a fan zone in Glasgow for the Euros, while the city was under restrictions.
Been reading a book called 'How to fight a war' by former soldier turned Lib Dem MP Mike Martin. It's a good read, like his other book 'Why we fight', though it just cements my astonishment that human beings are capable of mass warfare, because the enormities of logistical supply are mind boggling just on the level of providing food, fuel, and underpants
Never mind any moral objections to fighting it is hard to believe we are administratively capable of such orgnisation as a species.
That we ARE capable is why 'we' won and not the Neanderthal's. Who weren't. Or indeed any of the other advanced hominid species.
Take that Homo Heidelbergensis!
Actually that there were other human specied around mere tens of thousands of years ago never ceases to blow my mind, give that advanced civilizations that we know of started to emerge 7-10 thousands years ago only.
Ah, but that's without any serious archaeology having been done on the lost lands flooded at the end of the Ice Age. Doggerland, the Persian Gulf, the vast Sunda Shelf connecting Malaysia/Indonesia (among others) would all have been above sea level 20,000 years ago.
We are missing not having @leon on this, one of his fave topics he has wrote a fairly successful novel about.
So in short, they are discarding a large proportion of those with low propensity to vote in the past. And therefore, surely, missing most of any movement caused by increased turnout in traditionally low propensity groups.
Which is pretty much what you've just pointed out in relation to Gregg Levine's comment on Selzer.
JUST IN: Vice Pres. Kamala Harris has 49% support among likely voters and former Pres. Donald Trump has 46%, according to final-weekend @ABC News/Ipsos poll.
I'm sure they have solved the underestimating problem. At least I'm sure they are sure they have. Or at least I'm sure they'll say they're sure they've solved it.
So if there are serious signs of a move to Harris, will Trump have a serious talk with his advisers about toning it down and looking presidential for the next couple of days or b) GO FULL TONTO?
You have to ask? Would a man capable of a) have done...well, pretty much anything he does?
He does cheat on his wives, which is pretty presidential behaviour admittedly.
'Ok sir, but could we cut down on the mock fellatio on mics stuff?'
The new Tory leader takes charge with a tepid endorsement from her party’s members, two-thirds of her parliamentary colleagues preferring someone else and prominent names declaring that they have no desire to serve in her shadow cabinet.
In her acceptance speech, she described the task ahead as “tough”, which is an understatement. The July election was the worst result for the Conservative party, both in terms of vote share and seats won, since 1832. I am not among those who think this means the Tories can never recover. They have been pronounced dead and buried in the past only then to rise from the grave. But they are unlikely to start recovering until – and unless – they have an honest reckoning with themselves about their multiple failings in government.
Surveys suggest that very few voters think the Conservatives lost the election because they were too left wing while the majority of those with an opinion put it down to their incompetence.
One of the biggest challenges for the new leader of the opposition, and especially when the Tory parliamentary presence is so small, will be persuading voters to pay them any heed. The case made for Mrs Badenoch by her promoters is that she is “box office” with a gift for grabbing attention. What she has often failed to grasp is that there is such a thing as the wrong kind of attention. “Still in development” is the assessment of one reasonably sympathetic senior Tory.
Conservatives have displayed next to no interest in atoning for all the things voters came to loathe about them. There has never been a comprehensive repudiation of Boris Johnson for debauching standards in public life. Nor has there been an expression of suitably abject contrition for Liz Truss’s calamitous experiment with the economy. Nor have senior Tories had the humility to acknowledge that they left a super-massive black hole in the Treasury’s books. When you have fouled up as badly and as repeatedly as the Conservatives did in government, the first step to redemption with the electorate is to own your blunders and express regret for them.
Even if voters become persistently discontented with Sir Keir’s government, the Tories are delusional if they imagine that this means the public will simply collapse back into their embrace and tell the Conservatives all is forgiven. Not least because so far the Tories have been almost completely incapable of recognising how much forgiveness they will need before they are taken seriously again. If Kemi Badenoch wants to get a hearing from the British people, she is first going to have to say sorry. And she is going to have to say it a lot.
I think this is why Badenoch was the better choice. Jenrick was continuity sleaze.
Kemi's victory speech was clear that big mistakes were made by the Tories in office and that they need to have a long hard look at themselves.
Her musings in the past that WFP should be scrapped (which she rowed back on when it became Labour policy) and on Maternity pay being too generous shows a real willingness to make deep cuts to welfare and pensions in order to move to a low tax country.
I wonder if she has the courage to scrap the Triple Lock. She just might.
Badenoch’s weakness is that she is very tribal, aggressively so. The most successful politicians have the ability to look over the party horizon and sympathise without and understand voters that make other choices. She shares Corbyns disdain for the opposition. Evangelical self righteousness makes big tent politics far harder.
Kemi is more agnostic Catholic than evangelical. Her husband Hamish is Roman Catholic.
“My mother’s father. My paternal grandmother was a Muslim, though to be fair she did convert in later life. My family’s sort of Anglican and Methodist. My maternal grandfather was a Methodist reverend.”
ConHome: “And where did he practice?”
Badenoch: “In Nigeria. I was born here [in Wimbledon], but I call myself first generation, because I grew up in Nigeria and I chose to come back here. So I’m agnostic really, but I was brought up with cultural Christian values.”
ConHome: “Have you had your children baptised?”
Badenoch: “Yes, because I’m married to a Catholic [she and Hamish Badenoch, whose mother emigrated from Ireland, have two children].”
ConHome: “They’re being brought up as Catholics, are they?”
I mean she doesn’t believe in God. So the rest is gravy. Let’s not go there again. First time we have had atheists leading both big parties.
No, agnostics are not atheists and as she is married to a Roman Catholic and bringing up her children as Roman Catholic she is more religious than secular atheist. Even Starmer while an atheist, not even agnostic, is married to a Jewish lady and bringing up his children Jewish.
Cleverly was an atheist too but was knocked out in the MPs round
So if there are serious signs of a move to Harris, will Trump have a serious talk with his advisers about toning it down and looking presidential for the next couple of days or b) GO FULL TONTO?
You have to ask? Would a man capable of a) have done...well, pretty much anything he does?
He does cheat on his wives, which is pretty presidential behaviour admittedly.
'Ok sir, but could we cut down on the mock fellatio on mics stuff?'
I'd really like to see the Dems takes Texas (again)!
It is technically one of the closest races outside of the 'official' swing states (or the closest if people still count Florida), but if that were to go it's a mahoosive win in the EC. We're not that lucky.
It is still a bit all over the place, there have been a few polls now saying Nevada for the Democrats after a lot of positive talk for the Republicans there, and a few with NC in play, even as Arizona has had several going more strongly GOP than expected. With Pennsylvania and Michigan, the absolute keys, deadlocked.
The new Tory leader takes charge with a tepid endorsement from her party’s members, two-thirds of her parliamentary colleagues preferring someone else and prominent names declaring that they have no desire to serve in her shadow cabinet.
In her acceptance speech, she described the task ahead as “tough”, which is an understatement. The July election was the worst result for the Conservative party, both in terms of vote share and seats won, since 1832. I am not among those who think this means the Tories can never recover. They have been pronounced dead and buried in the past only then to rise from the grave. But they are unlikely to start recovering until – and unless – they have an honest reckoning with themselves about their multiple failings in government.
Surveys suggest that very few voters think the Conservatives lost the election because they were too left wing while the majority of those with an opinion put it down to their incompetence.
One of the biggest challenges for the new leader of the opposition, and especially when the Tory parliamentary presence is so small, will be persuading voters to pay them any heed. The case made for Mrs Badenoch by her promoters is that she is “box office” with a gift for grabbing attention. What she has often failed to grasp is that there is such a thing as the wrong kind of attention. “Still in development” is the assessment of one reasonably sympathetic senior Tory.
Conservatives have displayed next to no interest in atoning for all the things voters came to loathe about them. There has never been a comprehensive repudiation of Boris Johnson for debauching standards in public life. Nor has there been an expression of suitably abject contrition for Liz Truss’s calamitous experiment with the economy. Nor have senior Tories had the humility to acknowledge that they left a super-massive black hole in the Treasury’s books. When you have fouled up as badly and as repeatedly as the Conservatives did in government, the first step to redemption with the electorate is to own your blunders and express regret for them.
Even if voters become persistently discontented with Sir Keir’s government, the Tories are delusional if they imagine that this means the public will simply collapse back into their embrace and tell the Conservatives all is forgiven. Not least because so far the Tories have been almost completely incapable of recognising how much forgiveness they will need before they are taken seriously again. If Kemi Badenoch wants to get a hearing from the British people, she is first going to have to say sorry. And she is going to have to say it a lot.
Even worse for them membership numbers down:
"In 2022, when Liz Truss defeated Rishi Sunak, 141,725 members out of about 172,000 voted. However, by Saturday there were only 131,680 Tory members eligible to vote for the next leader, a drop of 23%."
And as only 95,000 of those voted looks as if actual paying membership will drop further.
Fewer members means less money.
Badenoch urgently needs to work out how to attract some younger members, to replace those taking their membership to the graveyard.
In the long scheme of things people join political parties for particular reasons. No-one has to. Forget the glorious past of Tories as a middle class dating agency. It isn't coming back.
The reasons: support for fundamental principles; and/or access to the power/money/jobs greasy pole at some level, from Great Snoring Parish Council to Prime Minister to business person.
The Tories stood for: competence, moderation, wealth creation, a Burkean view of change, small platoons, sound defence, self reliance, a degree of equality of opportunity, no interest in equality of outcomes.
I can't give an account at this moment of what set of principles anyone would join for. If that is so, then it will be dominated by chancers.
How's that "Starmer is the real one-nation Tory" stuff going for you ?
Good question. However, in my view he was the nearest, not 'the real'. First impressions? Not bad, but awful presentation. Still loads better than the Tories. If there were an election tomorrow I would vote Labour.
Budget? I note the critics on the whole have picked individual holes, (as can I) but can't offer much by way of alternative to tax, borrow and spend.
Chortle.
I suspect deep-down you know you got this badly wrong and it's only pride and cognitive dissonance that's keeping you from admitting it, because you fear humiliation and the "told you sos" more than anything else.
Harris slight advantage in that particular poll, as she wins if she gets the states she's ahead in. Trump would have to win both tied states plus Georgia or NC.
True, but the leads are so tiny that to a good approximation all those except Arizona might as well be 50-50. I haven't checked my sums, but I think the other 6 states have 82 EC votes between them, and of those Trump needs 40 to win, and Harris 44.
A buff with the T-Cut and put a couple of new tyres on it, it’ll be just fine!
I think it is great that the race starts about three hours after the end of qualifying.
It’s great for those who didn’t bin it during that session. I suspect we’ll be seeing 17 or 18 cars start the race. Albon’s looks like a chassis change, which definitely isn’t happening. 190 minutes until the parade lap.
Everyone in America has an aunt like Ann Selzer and an uncle like Nate Silver. Nate talks loudly all night long until Ann chimes in with a totally brilliant point to undermine him. (Also, Nate talks with his mouth full and Ann made all the desserts)
I don't know about anybody else, but I'm finding this US election quite stressful, largely because a) it's important, and b) I've absolutely no idea who's going to win - and I don't believe anybody else knows either. It's the hope that stresses you.
To be honest I have no stress as I have no doubt Harris will win
Let's all be positive
Fair enough, but how can you possibly be so confident?
I really cannot answer it other than my instinct says Harris will win
Maybe I am also relaxed as I do not bet and have no stress over any betting position !!!!
Wednesday 6th November will see President Harris
Though how she performs in the role I have no idea
1. Americans don't call the winner "President" till January 20
By contrast, Rishi Sunak vacated Number 10 within 24 hours of losing the election back in July.
There are positives to having a 'handover' period, and stages of certification and other formalities, but goddamn it's nice to be able to a leader out within the day - sobering reminder on the transience of their power.
JUST IN: Vice Pres. Kamala Harris has 49% support among likely voters and former Pres. Donald Trump has 46%, according to final-weekend @ABC News/Ipsos poll.
The new Tory leader takes charge with a tepid endorsement from her party’s members, two-thirds of her parliamentary colleagues preferring someone else and prominent names declaring that they have no desire to serve in her shadow cabinet.
In her acceptance speech, she described the task ahead as “tough”, which is an understatement. The July election was the worst result for the Conservative party, both in terms of vote share and seats won, since 1832. I am not among those who think this means the Tories can never recover. They have been pronounced dead and buried in the past only then to rise from the grave. But they are unlikely to start recovering until – and unless – they have an honest reckoning with themselves about their multiple failings in government.
Surveys suggest that very few voters think the Conservatives lost the election because they were too left wing while the majority of those with an opinion put it down to their incompetence.
One of the biggest challenges for the new leader of the opposition, and especially when the Tory parliamentary presence is so small, will be persuading voters to pay them any heed. The case made for Mrs Badenoch by her promoters is that she is “box office” with a gift for grabbing attention. What she has often failed to grasp is that there is such a thing as the wrong kind of attention. “Still in development” is the assessment of one reasonably sympathetic senior Tory.
Conservatives have displayed next to no interest in atoning for all the things voters came to loathe about them. There has never been a comprehensive repudiation of Boris Johnson for debauching standards in public life. Nor has there been an expression of suitably abject contrition for Liz Truss’s calamitous experiment with the economy. Nor have senior Tories had the humility to acknowledge that they left a super-massive black hole in the Treasury’s books. When you have fouled up as badly and as repeatedly as the Conservatives did in government, the first step to redemption with the electorate is to own your blunders and express regret for them.
Even if voters become persistently discontented with Sir Keir’s government, the Tories are delusional if they imagine that this means the public will simply collapse back into their embrace and tell the Conservatives all is forgiven. Not least because so far the Tories have been almost completely incapable of recognising how much forgiveness they will need before they are taken seriously again. If Kemi Badenoch wants to get a hearing from the British people, she is first going to have to say sorry. And she is going to have to say it a lot.
I think this is why Badenoch was the better choice. Jenrick was continuity sleaze.
Kemi's victory speech was clear that big mistakes were made by the Tories in office and that they need to have a long hard look at themselves.
Her musings in the past that WFP should be scrapped (which she rowed back on when it became Labour policy) and on Maternity pay being too generous shows a real willingness to make deep cuts to welfare and pensions in order to move to a low tax country.
I wonder if she has the courage to scrap the Triple Lock. She just might.
Badenoch’s weakness is that she is very tribal, aggressively so. The most successful politicians have the ability to look over the party horizon and sympathise without and understand voters that make other choices. She shares Corbyns disdain for the opposition. Evangelical self righteousness makes big tent politics far harder.
Kemi is more agnostic Catholic than evangelical. Her husband Hamish is Roman Catholic.
“My mother’s father. My paternal grandmother was a Muslim, though to be fair she did convert in later life. My family’s sort of Anglican and Methodist. My maternal grandfather was a Methodist reverend.”
ConHome: “And where did he practice?”
Badenoch: “In Nigeria. I was born here [in Wimbledon], but I call myself first generation, because I grew up in Nigeria and I chose to come back here. So I’m agnostic really, but I was brought up with cultural Christian values.”
ConHome: “Have you had your children baptised?”
Badenoch: “Yes, because I’m married to a Catholic [she and Hamish Badenoch, whose mother emigrated from Ireland, have two children].”
ConHome: “They’re being brought up as Catholics, are they?”
I mean she doesn’t believe in God. So the rest is gravy. Let’s not go there again. First time we have had atheists leading both big parties.
No, agnostics are not atheists and as she is married to a Roman Catholic and bringing up her children as Roman Catholic she is more religious than secular atheist. Even Starmer while an atheist, not even agnostic, is married to a Jewish lady and bringing up his children Jewish.
Cleverly was an atheist too but was knocked out in the MPs round
There's a difference between religion-as-culture and religion-as-belief. I realise England is the country that invented Anglicanism to give agnostics a nice place to sit, but even so belief is the dividing line
So in short, they are discarding a large proportion of those with low propensity to vote in the past. And therefore, surely, missing most of any movement caused by increased turnout in traditionally low propensity groups.
Which is pretty much what you've just pointed out in relation to Gregg Levine's comment on Selzer.
Interesting.
Yep, I've always thought that this election could potentially see turnout records broken - and mainly by groups motivated to vote against Trump. And the indications from early voting are that it is increasingly likely to be a record breaker. My prediction all along has been for a 'comfortable' Harris victory. I'm now wondering if I've underestimated just how well she's going to do.
And one final thought: she's run an excellent campaign, well beyond my expectations - and the unity of the Democrats has been truly impressive. Trump has really served to focus minds.
So if there are definite signs of a move to Harris, will Trump have a serious talk with his advisers about toning it down and looking presidential for the next couple of days or b) GO FULL TONTO?
The new Tory leader takes charge with a tepid endorsement from her party’s members, two-thirds of her parliamentary colleagues preferring someone else and prominent names declaring that they have no desire to serve in her shadow cabinet.
In her acceptance speech, she described the task ahead as “tough”, which is an understatement. The July election was the worst result for the Conservative party, both in terms of vote share and seats won, since 1832. I am not among those who think this means the Tories can never recover. They have been pronounced dead and buried in the past only then to rise from the grave. But they are unlikely to start recovering until – and unless – they have an honest reckoning with themselves about their multiple failings in government.
Surveys suggest that very few voters think the Conservatives lost the election because they were too left wing while the majority of those with an opinion put it down to their incompetence.
One of the biggest challenges for the new leader of the opposition, and especially when the Tory parliamentary presence is so small, will be persuading voters to pay them any heed. The case made for Mrs Badenoch by her promoters is that she is “box office” with a gift for grabbing attention. What she has often failed to grasp is that there is such a thing as the wrong kind of attention. “Still in development” is the assessment of one reasonably sympathetic senior Tory.
Conservatives have displayed next to no interest in atoning for all the things voters came to loathe about them. There has never been a comprehensive repudiation of Boris Johnson for debauching standards in public life. Nor has there been an expression of suitably abject contrition for Liz Truss’s calamitous experiment with the economy. Nor have senior Tories had the humility to acknowledge that they left a super-massive black hole in the Treasury’s books. When you have fouled up as badly and as repeatedly as the Conservatives did in government, the first step to redemption with the electorate is to own your blunders and express regret for them.
Even if voters become persistently discontented with Sir Keir’s government, the Tories are delusional if they imagine that this means the public will simply collapse back into their embrace and tell the Conservatives all is forgiven. Not least because so far the Tories have been almost completely incapable of recognising how much forgiveness they will need before they are taken seriously again. If Kemi Badenoch wants to get a hearing from the British people, she is first going to have to say sorry. And she is going to have to say it a lot.
I think this is why Badenoch was the better choice. Jenrick was continuity sleaze.
Kemi's victory speech was clear that big mistakes were made by the Tories in office and that they need to have a long hard look at themselves.
Her musings in the past that WFP should be scrapped (which she rowed back on when it became Labour policy) and on Maternity pay being too generous shows a real willingness to make deep cuts to welfare and pensions in order to move to a low tax country.
I wonder if she has the courage to scrap the Triple Lock. She just might.
Badenoch’s weakness is that she is very tribal, aggressively so. The most successful politicians have the ability to look over the party horizon and sympathise without and understand voters that make other choices. She shares Corbyns disdain for the opposition. Evangelical self righteousness makes big tent politics far harder.
I think she will rub a lot of people the wrong way, particularly if she goes heavy on the social authoritarianism of the National Conservatives.
I think she is quite socially conservative herself, but the key issue is whether she wants to force that social conservatism on the rest of us, or whether she actually believes in freedom.
That's always the tricky bit for social conservatives. In theory, "I respect your freedom to go full-on Gilead in your personal life" ought to work, but in practice it doesn't. As our friends across the Atlantic are demonstrating.
I always find it interesting how vociferously left-wingers and progressive liberals argue against any pushback to their sociocultural consensus. "Stick to the economics, guys!"
Maybe they doth protest too much...
No, it's just old fashioned Liberalism. It's why I don't vote Labour or Conservative, but was swayed to vote for Cameron in 2010.
Identity politics goes against Liberalism.
That's why I oppose it.
I don't support Identity Politics.
In particular the nasty right wing populism prevalent across the world.
Yes, but you do, don't you? Provided it's the right type of identity politics, in which case you argue it isn't really anyway.
I think you may have got some of us non-right wingers wrong. Most of us couldn't really care less about taking the knee at Wembley, although we are offended by riots incited by senior politicians quoting Andrew Tate. And I couldn't really demonstrate an interest in LGBT rights.
I do have diametrically opposed opinions to yourself on certain issues but my view (probably like yours) is borne out of practicality. Take the VAT on schools issue that you keep flagging me for. Your view is you should be entitled to educate your children to the standards you desire. I agree you should, but for the privilege you should pay VAT on that lifestyle choice. I would prefer all children to have the same opportunities awarded to your children at their private school, but in a top quality state school. If the UK state sector were properly funded and as such results based on the merit of the student rather than because of their parents income the UK would ( in my view) be a richer nation.
I went to a great comprehensive school which was promoted through the will of then Education Secretary Margaret Thatcher, it was full of students whose parents could have afforded Solihull or Bromsgrove Schools but they chose not to because they didn't need to.
In order to pay for such a service a higher taxation burden is required. One question begs another and so on. But fundamentally do we want the top 7% to flourish and everyone else to flounder? I don't believe identity politics plays any part in that central theme. We would all be treated equally.
I am beginning to think that the Tory party will recover faster than most of us thought possible, The wipe out of so many Tory MPs is in some ways a benefit to Kemi. The Tories can restart with a fresh team untainted by the past issues. Jenerick's focus on Reform was a big mistake. Many of Reform's voters will never vote Tory. Remember it was the Tory party that put Tommy in jail in the first place.
Kemi needs to focus on the traditional groups of Tory voters the farmers, the small business owners and the striving middle class who want to send their kids to private schools. This along with the senior citizens can give them a base of 30-35% of the voters. The first big challenge is Scotland in May next year. I expect the Tories if Kemi delivers will do Ok and may take a couple of rural seats off the SNP.
Scotland isn't up until 2026, next year it is only shire county council seats and the odd unitary up.
Given the Tories got 36% and Labour 29% last time those seats were up in 2021 I expect both to lose seats to Reform and also but to a lesser extent the LDs and Greens and Independents
Agree. I posted earlier that I expect the Tories to lose big in Surrey (and the rest of the SE?) to the LDs, but Reform and Tories to make gains from Labour elsewhere.
After the 2025 counties the Tories will not be defending so much so will start making gains again.
If they can contain Reform, if not they risk losing some seats to Reform and the LDs even if they still gain some off Labour
Been reading a book called 'How to fight a war' by former soldier turned Lib Dem MP Mike Martin. It's a good read, like his other book 'Why we fight', though it just cements my astonishment that human beings are capable of mass warfare, because the enormities of logistical supply are mind boggling just on the level of providing food, fuel, and underpants
Never mind any moral objections to fighting it is hard to believe we are administratively capable of such orgnisation as a species.
That we ARE capable is why 'we' won and not the Neanderthal's. Who weren't. Or indeed any of the other advanced hominid species.
Take that Homo Heidelbergensis!
Actually that there were other human specied around mere tens of thousands of years ago never ceases to blow my mind, give that advanced civilizations that we know of started to emerge 7-10 thousands years ago only.
Ah, but that's without any serious archaeology having been done on the lost lands flooded at the end of the Ice Age. Doggerland, the Persian Gulf, the vast Sunda Shelf connecting Malaysia/Indonesia (among others) would all have been above sea level 20,000 years ago.
We are missing not having @leon on this, one of his fave topics he has wrote a fairly successful novel about.
Wasn't there, at the time, a land connection between what is now Indonesia and what is now Australia?
A buff with the T-Cut and put a couple of new tyres on it, it’ll be just fine!
I think it is great that the race starts about three hours after the end of qualifying.
It’s great for those who didn’t bin it during that session. I suspect we’ll be seeing 17 or 18 cars start the race. Albon’s looks like a chassis change, which definitely isn’t happening. 190 minutes until the parade lap.
The new Tory leader takes charge with a tepid endorsement from her party’s members, two-thirds of her parliamentary colleagues preferring someone else and prominent names declaring that they have no desire to serve in her shadow cabinet.
In her acceptance speech, she described the task ahead as “tough”, which is an understatement. The July election was the worst result for the Conservative party, both in terms of vote share and seats won, since 1832. I am not among those who think this means the Tories can never recover. They have been pronounced dead and buried in the past only then to rise from the grave. But they are unlikely to start recovering until – and unless – they have an honest reckoning with themselves about their multiple failings in government.
Surveys suggest that very few voters think the Conservatives lost the election because they were too left wing while the majority of those with an opinion put it down to their incompetence.
One of the biggest challenges for the new leader of the opposition, and especially when the Tory parliamentary presence is so small, will be persuading voters to pay them any heed. The case made for Mrs Badenoch by her promoters is that she is “box office” with a gift for grabbing attention. What she has often failed to grasp is that there is such a thing as the wrong kind of attention. “Still in development” is the assessment of one reasonably sympathetic senior Tory.
Conservatives have displayed next to no interest in atoning for all the things voters came to loathe about them. There has never been a comprehensive repudiation of Boris Johnson for debauching standards in public life. Nor has there been an expression of suitably abject contrition for Liz Truss’s calamitous experiment with the economy. Nor have senior Tories had the humility to acknowledge that they left a super-massive black hole in the Treasury’s books. When you have fouled up as badly and as repeatedly as the Conservatives did in government, the first step to redemption with the electorate is to own your blunders and express regret for them.
Even if voters become persistently discontented with Sir Keir’s government, the Tories are delusional if they imagine that this means the public will simply collapse back into their embrace and tell the Conservatives all is forgiven. Not least because so far the Tories have been almost completely incapable of recognising how much forgiveness they will need before they are taken seriously again. If Kemi Badenoch wants to get a hearing from the British people, she is first going to have to say sorry. And she is going to have to say it a lot.
I think this is why Badenoch was the better choice. Jenrick was continuity sleaze.
Kemi's victory speech was clear that big mistakes were made by the Tories in office and that they need to have a long hard look at themselves.
Her musings in the past that WFP should be scrapped (which she rowed back on when it became Labour policy) and on Maternity pay being too generous shows a real willingness to make deep cuts to welfare and pensions in order to move to a low tax country.
I wonder if she has the courage to scrap the Triple Lock. She just might.
Badenoch’s weakness is that she is very tribal, aggressively so. The most successful politicians have the ability to look over the party horizon and sympathise without and understand voters that make other choices. She shares Corbyns disdain for the opposition. Evangelical self righteousness makes big tent politics far harder.
Kemi is more agnostic Catholic than evangelical. Her husband Hamish is Roman Catholic.
“My mother’s father. My paternal grandmother was a Muslim, though to be fair she did convert in later life. My family’s sort of Anglican and Methodist. My maternal grandfather was a Methodist reverend.”
ConHome: “And where did he practice?”
Badenoch: “In Nigeria. I was born here [in Wimbledon], but I call myself first generation, because I grew up in Nigeria and I chose to come back here. So I’m agnostic really, but I was brought up with cultural Christian values.”
ConHome: “Have you had your children baptised?”
Badenoch: “Yes, because I’m married to a Catholic [she and Hamish Badenoch, whose mother emigrated from Ireland, have two children].”
ConHome: “They’re being brought up as Catholics, are they?”
I mean she doesn’t believe in God. So the rest is gravy. Let’s not go there again. First time we have had atheists leading both big parties.
No, agnostics are not atheists and as she is married to a Roman Catholic and bringing up her children as Roman Catholic she is more religious than secular atheist. Even Starmer while an atheist, not even agnostic, is married to a Jewish lady and bringing up his children Jewish.
Cleverly was an atheist too but was knocked out in the MPs round
There's a difference between religion-as-culture and religion-as-belief. I realise England is the country that invented Anglicanism to give agnostics a nice place to sit, but even so belief is the dividing line
Agnostics by definition neither don't believe in God or have belief in God, they are like Independent swing voters on religion and often culturally religious even if not believers.
Atheists are anti religion as well as not believing in God, active religious believe in God and are culturally religious and worshippers too
A buff with the T-Cut and put a couple of new tyres on it, it’ll be just fine!
I think it is great that the race starts about three hours after the end of qualifying.
It’s great for those who didn’t bin it during that session. I suspect we’ll be seeing 17 or 18 cars start the race. Albon’s looks like a chassis change, which definitely isn’t happening. 190 minutes until the parade lap.
I am really looking forward to this edition of wacky races.
Been reading a book called 'How to fight a war' by former soldier turned Lib Dem MP Mike Martin. It's a good read, like his other book 'Why we fight', though it just cements my astonishment that human beings are capable of mass warfare, because the enormities of logistical supply are mind boggling just on the level of providing food, fuel, and underpants
Never mind any moral objections to fighting it is hard to believe we are administratively capable of such orgnisation as a species.
That we ARE capable is why 'we' won and not the Neanderthal's. Who weren't. Or indeed any of the other advanced hominid species.
Take that Homo Heidelbergensis!
Actually that there were other human specied around mere tens of thousands of years ago never ceases to blow my mind, give that advanced civilizations that we know of started to emerge 7-10 thousands years ago only.
Ah, but that's without any serious archaeology having been done on the lost lands flooded at the end of the Ice Age. Doggerland, the Persian Gulf, the vast Sunda Shelf connecting Malaysia/Indonesia (among others) would all have been above sea level 20,000 years ago.
We are missing not having @leon on this, one of his fave topics he has wrote a fairly successful novel about.
Wasn't there, at the time, a land connection between what is now Indonesia and what is now Australia?
Hence, apparently, the prevalence of australisian flora and fauna in papua new guina, but asian flora and fauna in the rest of the archipelago at the Sundalands.
Edit: Also, I initially read that as you saying you were not there at the time - we know you are experienced, but not that much, Your Majesty!
Everyone in America has an aunt like Ann Selzer and an uncle like Nate Silver. Nate talks loudly all night long until Ann chimes in with a totally brilliant point to undermine him. (Also, Nate talks with his mouth full and Ann made all the desserts)
Her pecan pie is the stuff of legends....
Someone’s going to be eating her humble pie come Wednesday. Probably not her.
I wonder if Badenoch will grow into the role. SKS also started off more shakey but gained confidence over time.
Even Corbyn grew into the role. Her first outing. Competent and solid.
In one sense time is on her side. No election anywhere close, and Labour have the job that any government would find either difficult or impossible. If Kemi's aim is to get power back on the Buggins turn basis, she has a chance.
The harder aim would be to get power and also to attend to the questions. That is, what do Tories believe, what are their USPs, what sort of society do they aim at, is it attainable, if so how, what is the long term action required on tax, borrow and spend, what exactly is the state going to stop doing, how do we do post-Brexit properly, etc.
The LDs could help themselves and us by doing all this first, and Labour is offering them a window to do so by communicating so badly.
A buff with the T-Cut and put a couple of new tyres on it, it’ll be just fine!
I think it is great that the race starts about three hours after the end of qualifying.
It’s great for those who didn’t bin it during that session. I suspect we’ll be seeing 17 or 18 cars start the race. Albon’s looks like a chassis change, which definitely isn’t happening. 190 minutes until the parade lap.
I am really looking forward to this edition of wacky races.
So long as Yuki doesn’t go kamikaze on Norris on the first lap…
Mr. B, the Janjaweed[sp] militia that committed the atrocities in Darfur years ago grew up into a sort-of second army. The dictator of Sudan wanted to use that second army to counterbalance the actual army and thereby present* a coup.
Instead, the two armies agreed to oust the dictator, then had a civil war anyway. Horrific for the people.
Been reading a book called 'How to fight a war' by former soldier turned Lib Dem MP Mike Martin. It's a good read, like his other book 'Why we fight', though it just cements my astonishment that human beings are capable of mass warfare, because the enormities of logistical supply are mind boggling just on the level of providing food, fuel, and underpants
Never mind any moral objections to fighting it is hard to believe we are administratively capable of such orgnisation as a species.
That we ARE capable is why 'we' won and not the Neanderthal's. Who weren't. Or indeed any of the other advanced hominid species.
Take that Homo Heidelbergensis!
Actually that there were other human specied around mere tens of thousands of years ago never ceases to blow my mind, give that advanced civilizations that we know of started to emerge 7-10 thousands years ago only.
Ah, but that's without any serious archaeology having been done on the lost lands flooded at the end of the Ice Age. Doggerland, the Persian Gulf, the vast Sunda Shelf connecting Malaysia/Indonesia (among others) would all have been above sea level 20,000 years ago.
We are missing not having @leon on this, one of his fave topics he has wrote a fairly successful novel about.
Wasn't there, at the time, a land connection between what is now Indonesia and what is now Australia?
Not really. It was between New Guinea and Australia (the Sahul Continent). There was still deep water between New Guinea and the rest of Indonesia.
If Trump wins, he is going to do some stupid and dangerous shit
If he doesn't win, his supporters are going to do some stupid and dangerous shit
Either way, buckle up
Good luck to his supporters trying to get on the floor of Congress again.
There will have been a massive plan developed since January 6th 2021. Democracy isn't going to stand for that shit a second time.
His supporters in the State Houses are not going to certify the votes. And anybody who does turn up on January 6th next time will be carrying...
State Houses are not involved in certifying votes in any way AFAIK. They pass legislation about how the election will be conducted but that happens before the election not after.
If Trump wins, he is going to do some stupid and dangerous shit
If he doesn't win, his supporters are going to do some stupid and dangerous shit
Either way, buckle up
What utter hysteria. He held the presidency, the most powerful political position in the world and was entirely unable to persuade anyone who had the power to do so to not confirm the elections. He managed not a single General, a single director, a governor, his own vice president, not even a local police captain to do his bidding. How on earth will he do it from the outside?
JUST IN: Vice Pres. Kamala Harris has 49% support among likely voters and former Pres. Donald Trump has 46%, according to final-weekend @ABC News/Ipsos poll.
Trump showing again he can't break the 46% ceiling.
Relative to 2020 ABC has Harris making gains with white women and non college educated white men (likely via Walz) and Trump making gains with Hispanics and Black men and Independents and building an even bigger lead with white evangelical Protestants.
'Estimates among Hispanic likely voters have been stable in three of the past four ABC/Ipsos polls, in mid-September, early October and this one, averaging 55-41%, Harris-Trump (54-39% in this poll). Last week's 64-34% among Hispanic likely voters was different, although it approximated the result in the 2020 exit poll, 65-32%, Biden-Trump.... Harris, who's tried to attract disaffected Republicans, has 7% support in that group, while 3% of Democrats support Trump. Harris also wins support from 11% of conservatives, vs. Trump's 4% among liberals. Independents – who've gone with the winner in nine of the last 12 presidential elections – are now +5 for Harris, 49-44%, although that's not a significant difference. Harris leads by 55-37% among independent women, while it's close, 49-45%, Trump-Harris, among independent men. Harris has support from 76% of Black men in these results (Biden won 79% of this group in 2020) and 87% of Black women. The race is close – a non-significant Trump +4 – among white women, 50-46%, a group he won by 11 points in 2020. A Democrat hasn't won white women since 1996, though Al Gore came within a whisker in 2000. Trump leads by 13 points among white men, 54-41%. Harris has an especially wide lead among women age 18-29, 69-29%. That compares with a non-significant Trump +5 among men that age, 49-44%. Harris is maintaining a lead among suburban women, 55-40%, while the contest remains close among suburban men, 49-46%, Trump-Harris. The gender gap among all likely voters is 16 points – a non-significant Trump +5 among men, 50-45%, Harris +11 among women, 53-42%. That's similar to where it's been, as well as similar to the average (19 points) in exit polls since 1996. Trump has almost identical leads among non-college white men (63-33%) and non-college white women (62-33%) alike. Among all likely voters who don't have at least a four-year degree, it's Trump +11 points (53-42%); among college graduates, Harris +22 (59-37%). In a group that's central to Republican prospects, Trump leads by 80-16% among white evangelical Protestants. Among all likely voters who are not white evangelical Protestants, it's Harris over Trump, 55-40%. The seven battleground states, taken together, look like the nation: A 49-46%, Harris-Trump contest.' https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/election-stays-close-final-weekend-dispirited-electorate-poll/story?id=115278707&cid=social_twitter_abcn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election#Voter_demographics
If Trump wins, he is going to do some stupid and dangerous shit
If he doesn't win, his supporters are going to do some stupid and dangerous shit
Either way, buckle up
Good luck to his supporters trying to get on the floor of Congress again.
There will have been a massive plan developed since January 6th 2021. Democracy isn't going to stand for that shit a second time.
His supporters in the State Houses are not going to certify the votes. And anybody who does turn up on January 6th next time will be carrying...
State Houses are not involved in certifying votes in any way AFAIK. They pass legislation about how the election will be conducted but that happens before the election not after.
I think people are thinking of the attempts to fiddle with the slates of electors.
Think it'll be a little while until the market properly gets going on Ladbrokes. Got almost half a dozen initial betting ideas thanks to the grid being the way it is.
Edited extra bit: Albon's car was comprehensively trashed. Not too surprising he isn't starting but very bad for Williams with Ocon doing so well.
A buff with the T-Cut and put a couple of new tyres on it, it’ll be just fine!
I think it is great that the race starts about three hours after the end of qualifying.
It’s great for those who didn’t bin it during that session. I suspect we’ll be seeing 17 or 18 cars start the race. Albon’s looks like a chassis change, which definitely isn’t happening. 190 minutes until the parade lap.
I am really looking forward to this edition of wacky races.
So long as Yuki doesn’t go kamikaze on Norris on the first lap…
Sir Lewis needs to take out Max Verstappen for the greater good.
Kemi Badenoch says she would reverse the introduction of VAT on private school fees.
Labour popping champagne corks.
The Tories fighting last years battles - by the time the Tories come back into power (even if it's 2028) what's left of the private school sector won't need the change and probably couldn't cope with the extra demand..
You really think anything this Government does is going to last the time it takes to repeal something after their unmourned demise?
Yes.
All Governments always do making lasting changes.
I don't.
But @BartholomewRoberts is correct. Although Governments do sometimes change what an outgoing government introduced, many, if not most, if not nearly all changes a government makes are not changed by an incoming government, particularly social changes. One can make a huge list of major changes that following government don't change and even support although they opposed in opposition.
Indeed.
Anyone thinking this Government won't make any lasting changes is as naïve as those who thought that Brexit would be immediately reversed by Keir Starmer.
The truth is that all Governments make changes and when a new Government is elected its elected based on the status quo of what the last lot left you with, and the new Government is elected with its own new priorities - priorities are not simply spending five years reversing what the last lot did.
It's often different with the US because of the way there's a wholesale clearout of appointments to government agencies and so much is done by Executive Order now, rather than by legislation. So there's more of an expectation of completely reversing policy.
If Trump wins, he is going to do some stupid and dangerous shit
If he doesn't win, his supporters are going to do some stupid and dangerous shit
Either way, buckle up
What utter hysteria. He held the presidency, the most powerful political position in the world and was entirely unable to persuade anyone who had the power to do so to not confirm the elections. He managed not a single General, a single director, a governor, his own vice president, not even a local police captain to do his bidding. How on earth will he do it from the outside?
If Trump wins, he is going to do some stupid and dangerous shit
If he doesn't win, his supporters are going to do some stupid and dangerous shit
Either way, buckle up
What utter hysteria. He held the presidency, the most powerful political position in the world and was entirely unable to persuade anyone who had the power to do so to not confirm the elections. He managed not a single General, a single director, a governor, his own vice president, not even a local police captain to do his bidding. How on earth will he do it from the outside?
It was worse. He mobilised the mob
The mob, yes some yahoos in weird costumes who again, had absolutely no power, had zero expectation or plan on what to do other than shout loudly, got carried away and ended up in the Capitol building. The sufficient punishments for those who participated last time means that isnt happening again, and the building this time will not be left exposed in the same way.
If Trump wins, he is going to do some stupid and dangerous shit
If he doesn't win, his supporters are going to do some stupid and dangerous shit
Either way, buckle up
What utter hysteria. He held the presidency, the most powerful political position in the world and was entirely unable to persuade anyone who had the power to do so to not confirm the elections. He managed not a single General, a single director, a governor, his own vice president, not even a local police captain to do his bidding. How on earth will he do it from the outside?
A rare occasion when I tend to agree with you. Sporadic violence is certainly possible, but Trump out of office has few levers with which to subvert the election. Not that he won't try if he thinks it possible.
And we've already seen with the (thankfully few) incidents of ballot box arson that there are those out there prepared to break the law.
Kemi Badenoch says she would reverse the introduction of VAT on private school fees.
Labour popping champagne corks.
The Tories fighting last years battles - by the time the Tories come back into power (even if it's 2028) what's left of the private school sector won't need the change and probably couldn't cope with the extra demand..
You really think anything this Government does is going to last the time it takes to repeal something after their unmourned demise?
Yes.
All Governments always do making lasting changes.
I don't.
But @BartholomewRoberts is correct. Although Governments do sometimes change what an outgoing government introduced, many, if not most, if not nearly all changes a government makes are not changed by an incoming government, particularly social changes. One can make a huge list of major changes that following government don't change and even support although they opposed in opposition.
Indeed.
Anyone thinking this Government won't make any lasting changes is as naïve as those who thought that Brexit would be immediately reversed by Keir Starmer.
The truth is that all Governments make changes and when a new Government is elected its elected based on the status quo of what the last lot left you with, and the new Government is elected with its own new priorities - priorities are not simply spending five years reversing what the last lot did.
It's often different with the US because of the way there's a wholesale clearout of appointments to government agencies and so much is done by Executive Order now, rather than by legislation. So there's more of an expectation of completely reversing policy.
But in the UK it's different.
Even in the US some things don't get reversed -- Biden didn't reverse Trump's tariffs and policy on China, for instance. That one seems to have solidified into a cross party consensus that's a break from the previous political worldview.
Been reading a book called 'How to fight a war' by former soldier turned Lib Dem MP Mike Martin. It's a good read, like his other book 'Why we fight', though it just cements my astonishment that human beings are capable of mass warfare, because the enormities of logistical supply are mind boggling just on the level of providing food, fuel, and underpants
Never mind any moral objections to fighting it is hard to believe we are administratively capable of such orgnisation as a species.
That we ARE capable is why 'we' won and not the Neanderthal's. Who weren't. Or indeed any of the other advanced hominid species.
Take that Homo Heidelbergensis!
Actually that there were other human specied around mere tens of thousands of years ago never ceases to blow my mind, give that advanced civilizations that we know of started to emerge 7-10 thousands years ago only.
Ah, but that's without any serious archaeology having been done on the lost lands flooded at the end of the Ice Age. Doggerland, the Persian Gulf, the vast Sunda Shelf connecting Malaysia/Indonesia (among others) would all have been above sea level 20,000 years ago.
We are missing not having @leon on this, one of his fave topics he has wrote a fairly successful novel about.
He wrote fiction about the topic and fiction was all he ever contributed to the discussion.
Been reading a book called 'How to fight a war' by former soldier turned Lib Dem MP Mike Martin. It's a good read, like his other book 'Why we fight', though it just cements my astonishment that human beings are capable of mass warfare, because the enormities of logistical supply are mind boggling just on the level of providing food, fuel, and underpants
Never mind any moral objections to fighting it is hard to believe we are administratively capable of such orgnisation as a species.
That we ARE capable is why 'we' won and not the Neanderthal's. Who weren't. Or indeed any of the other advanced hominid species.
Take that Homo Heidelbergensis!
Actually that there were other human specied around mere tens of thousands of years ago never ceases to blow my mind, give that advanced civilizations that we know of started to emerge 7-10 thousands years ago only.
Ah, but that's without any serious archaeology having been done on the lost lands flooded at the end of the Ice Age. Doggerland, the Persian Gulf, the vast Sunda Shelf connecting Malaysia/Indonesia (among others) would all have been above sea level 20,000 years ago.
We are missing not having @leon on this, one of his fave topics he has wrote a fairly successful novel about.
He wrote fiction about the topic and fiction was all he ever contributed to the discussion.
His fiction was a consequence of a lot of research.
So if there are serious signs of a move to Harris, will Trump have a serious talk with his advisers about toning it down and looking presidential for the next couple of days or b) GO FULL TONTO?
You have to ask? Would a man capable of a) have done...well, pretty much anything he does?
He does cheat on his wives, which is pretty presidential behaviour admittedly.
He is also recorded as beating and raping at least one of his wives.
Account published in a book, for which Trump did not sue.
The part of the book that caused the most controversy concerns Trump’s divorce from his first wife, Ivana. Hurt obtained a copy of her sworn divorce deposition, from 1990, in which she stated that, the previous year, her husband had raped her in a fit of rage. In Hurt’s account, Trump was furious that a “scalp reduction” operation he’d undergone to eliminate a bald spot had been unexpectedly painful. Ivana had recommended the plastic surgeon.
In retaliation, Hurt wrote, Trump yanked out a handful of his wife’s hair, and then forced himself on her sexually. Afterward, according to the book, she spent the night locked in a bedroom, crying; in the morning, Trump asked her, “with menacing casualness, ‘Does it hurt?’ ” Trump has denied both the rape allegation and the suggestion that he had a scalp-reduction procedure. Hurt said that the incident, which is detailed in Ivana’s deposition, was confirmed by two of her friends. https://archive.ph/kLseM#selection-735.0-735.932
I wonder if the Iowa poll will be self-fulfilling. Dems are telling each other Iowa is a squeaker, they'll all turn out. Republicans are telling each other the poll is garbage, why bother voting when it's a sure thing?
If Trump wins, he is going to do some stupid and dangerous shit
If he doesn't win, his supporters are going to do some stupid and dangerous shit
Either way, buckle up
What utter hysteria. He held the presidency, the most powerful political position in the world and was entirely unable to persuade anyone who had the power to do so to not confirm the elections. He managed not a single General, a single director, a governor, his own vice president, not even a local police captain to do his bidding. How on earth will he do it from the outside?
A rare occasion when I tend to agree with you. Sporadic violence is certainly possible, but Trump out of office has few levers with which to subvert the election. Not that he won't try if he thinks it possible.
And we've already seen with the (thankfully few) incidents of ballot box arson that there are those out there prepared to break the law.
He is a sore loser, and a poison to the polity, but the constitution and institutions of the USA are stronger than one man, even a crazy one like him. He has no real agenda or philosophy other than himself, and that makes him substantially less dangerous than someone with a similar personality who wants to remake the world in his image. The world and the USA was no worse for the four years he was in charge than if it had been Hillary Clinton.
The new Tory leader takes charge with a tepid endorsement from her party’s members, two-thirds of her parliamentary colleagues preferring someone else and prominent names declaring that they have no desire to serve in her shadow cabinet.
In her acceptance speech, she described the task ahead as “tough”, which is an understatement. The July election was the worst result for the Conservative party, both in terms of vote share and seats won, since 1832. I am not among those who think this means the Tories can never recover. They have been pronounced dead and buried in the past only then to rise from the grave. But they are unlikely to start recovering until – and unless – they have an honest reckoning with themselves about their multiple failings in government.
Surveys suggest that very few voters think the Conservatives lost the election because they were too left wing while the majority of those with an opinion put it down to their incompetence.
One of the biggest challenges for the new leader of the opposition, and especially when the Tory parliamentary presence is so small, will be persuading voters to pay them any heed. The case made for Mrs Badenoch by her promoters is that she is “box office” with a gift for grabbing attention. What she has often failed to grasp is that there is such a thing as the wrong kind of attention. “Still in development” is the assessment of one reasonably sympathetic senior Tory.
Conservatives have displayed next to no interest in atoning for all the things voters came to loathe about them. There has never been a comprehensive repudiation of Boris Johnson for debauching standards in public life. Nor has there been an expression of suitably abject contrition for Liz Truss’s calamitous experiment with the economy. Nor have senior Tories had the humility to acknowledge that they left a super-massive black hole in the Treasury’s books. When you have fouled up as badly and as repeatedly as the Conservatives did in government, the first step to redemption with the electorate is to own your blunders and express regret for them.
Even if voters become persistently discontented with Sir Keir’s government, the Tories are delusional if they imagine that this means the public will simply collapse back into their embrace and tell the Conservatives all is forgiven. Not least because so far the Tories have been almost completely incapable of recognising how much forgiveness they will need before they are taken seriously again. If Kemi Badenoch wants to get a hearing from the British people, she is first going to have to say sorry. And she is going to have to say it a lot.
I think this is why Badenoch was the better choice. Jenrick was continuity sleaze.
Kemi's victory speech was clear that big mistakes were made by the Tories in office and that they need to have a long hard look at themselves.
Her musings in the past that WFP should be scrapped (which she rowed back on when it became Labour policy) and on Maternity pay being too generous shows a real willingness to make deep cuts to welfare and pensions in order to move to a low tax country.
I wonder if she has the courage to scrap the Triple Lock. She just might.
Badenoch’s weakness is that she is very tribal, aggressively so. The most successful politicians have the ability to look over the party horizon and sympathise without and understand voters that make other choices. She shares Corbyns disdain for the opposition. Evangelical self righteousness makes big tent politics far harder.
Kemi is more agnostic Catholic than evangelical. Her husband Hamish is Roman Catholic.
“My mother’s father. My paternal grandmother was a Muslim, though to be fair she did convert in later life. My family’s sort of Anglican and Methodist. My maternal grandfather was a Methodist reverend.”
ConHome: “And where did he practice?”
Badenoch: “In Nigeria. I was born here [in Wimbledon], but I call myself first generation, because I grew up in Nigeria and I chose to come back here. So I’m agnostic really, but I was brought up with cultural Christian values.”
ConHome: “Have you had your children baptised?”
Badenoch: “Yes, because I’m married to a Catholic [she and Hamish Badenoch, whose mother emigrated from Ireland, have two children].”
ConHome: “They’re being brought up as Catholics, are they?”
I mean she doesn’t believe in God. So the rest is gravy. Let’s not go there again. First time we have had atheists leading both big parties.
No, agnostics are not atheists and as she is married to a Roman Catholic and bringing up her children as Roman Catholic she is more religious than secular atheist. Even Starmer while an atheist, not even agnostic, is married to a Jewish lady and bringing up his children Jewish.
Cleverly was an atheist too but was knocked out in the MPs round
There's a difference between religion-as-culture and religion-as-belief. I realise England is the country that invented Anglicanism to give agnostics a nice place to sit, but even so belief is the dividing line
Agnostics by definition neither don't believe in God or have belief in God, they are like Independent swing voters on religion and often culturally religious even if not believers.
Atheists are anti religion as well as not believing in God, active religious believe in God and are culturally religious and worshippers too
Agnostics generally don’t do religion, however. They might go to Xmas carols, but atheists do that too. They are functionally closer to atheists.
I'm an atheist. Not sure what I do that could be considered anti-religion. I don't knock on people's doors trying to persuade them to stop believing in a deity.
@rcs1000, @TheScreamingEagles . I've uploaded an image in a shared message to you. Can you please look at this image file properties (right-click if on Windows) and see if you can identify me as the author. Kind regards, @viewcode
Been reading a book called 'How to fight a war' by former soldier turned Lib Dem MP Mike Martin. It's a good read, like his other book 'Why we fight', though it just cements my astonishment that human beings are capable of mass warfare, because the enormities of logistical supply are mind boggling just on the level of providing food, fuel, and underpants
Never mind any moral objections to fighting it is hard to believe we are administratively capable of such orgnisation as a species.
That we ARE capable is why 'we' won and not the Neanderthal's. Who weren't. Or indeed any of the other advanced hominid species.
Take that Homo Heidelbergensis!
Actually that there were other human specied around mere tens of thousands of years ago never ceases to blow my mind, give that advanced civilizations that we know of started to emerge 7-10 thousands years ago only.
Ah, but that's without any serious archaeology having been done on the lost lands flooded at the end of the Ice Age. Doggerland, the Persian Gulf, the vast Sunda Shelf connecting Malaysia/Indonesia (among others) would all have been above sea level 20,000 years ago.
We are missing not having @leon on this, one of his fave topics he has wrote a fairly successful novel about.
He wrote fiction about the topic and fiction was all he ever contributed to the discussion.
His fiction was a consequence of a lot of research.
I am not so sure that this Selzer poll is an outlier. Iowa has passed, against popular wishes, a draconian anti-abortion law. Women are pissed.
I may well be wish-projecting, but I think the pollsters have got it horribly wrong again: 1. There are no shy Trump voters. Any correction for this is wrong. Indeed, there may be GOPers who are scared to admit they are not voting for him (I see significant numbers of properties with GOP Senate race signs but no Trump signs) or scared to admit they are voting for Harris. My non-scientific hunch is this is overstating Trump by as much as 3% 2. The pollster have the wrong electorate - there is a massive surge in both woman and young voters. This too, benefits Harris.
FWIW, and I am fully prepared for the egg on my face come the end of the week, I think: 1. Harris will sweep the recognized swing states with the possible exception of AZ 2. She may well take IA and OH (abortion-related) and even, though less likely, TX 3. She could get very close in FL but I doubt it falls 4. I would not be surprised if there were some totally shocking results from States that have enacted the worst anti-abortion bills 5. GOP takes the Senate (alas), but Dems take the House.
All in all, I think it is a comfortable Harris win, with her EC range 300-420, depending on just how wrong the pollsters are.
If Trump wins, he is going to do some stupid and dangerous shit
If he doesn't win, his supporters are going to do some stupid and dangerous shit
Either way, buckle up
Good luck to his supporters trying to get on the floor of Congress again.
There will have been a massive plan developed since January 6th 2021. Democracy isn't going to stand for that shit a second time.
His supporters in the State Houses are not going to certify the votes. And anybody who does turn up on January 6th next time will be carrying...
State Houses are not involved in certifying votes in any way AFAIK. They pass legislation about how the election will be conducted but that happens before the election not after.
I think people are thinking of the attempts to fiddle with the slates of electors.
The new Tory leader takes charge with a tepid endorsement from her party’s members, two-thirds of her parliamentary colleagues preferring someone else and prominent names declaring that they have no desire to serve in her shadow cabinet.
In her acceptance speech, she described the task ahead as “tough”, which is an understatement. The July election was the worst result for the Conservative party, both in terms of vote share and seats won, since 1832. I am not among those who think this means the Tories can never recover. They have been pronounced dead and buried in the past only then to rise from the grave. But they are unlikely to start recovering until – and unless – they have an honest reckoning with themselves about their multiple failings in government.
Surveys suggest that very few voters think the Conservatives lost the election because they were too left wing while the majority of those with an opinion put it down to their incompetence.
One of the biggest challenges for the new leader of the opposition, and especially when the Tory parliamentary presence is so small, will be persuading voters to pay them any heed. The case made for Mrs Badenoch by her promoters is that she is “box office” with a gift for grabbing attention. What she has often failed to grasp is that there is such a thing as the wrong kind of attention. “Still in development” is the assessment of one reasonably sympathetic senior Tory.
Conservatives have displayed next to no interest in atoning for all the things voters came to loathe about them. There has never been a comprehensive repudiation of Boris Johnson for debauching standards in public life. Nor has there been an expression of suitably abject contrition for Liz Truss’s calamitous experiment with the economy. Nor have senior Tories had the humility to acknowledge that they left a super-massive black hole in the Treasury’s books. When you have fouled up as badly and as repeatedly as the Conservatives did in government, the first step to redemption with the electorate is to own your blunders and express regret for them.
Even if voters become persistently discontented with Sir Keir’s government, the Tories are delusional if they imagine that this means the public will simply collapse back into their embrace and tell the Conservatives all is forgiven. Not least because so far the Tories have been almost completely incapable of recognising how much forgiveness they will need before they are taken seriously again. If Kemi Badenoch wants to get a hearing from the British people, she is first going to have to say sorry. And she is going to have to say it a lot.
Even worse for them membership numbers down:
"In 2022, when Liz Truss defeated Rishi Sunak, 141,725 members out of about 172,000 voted. However, by Saturday there were only 131,680 Tory members eligible to vote for the next leader, a drop of 23%."
And as only 95,000 of those voted looks as if actual paying membership will drop further.
Fewer members means less money.
Let's be honest. No realistic prospect of tweaking government policy in a favourable way to the donar means less money.
Highlights how irrelevant mass membership is to party finances as well. 150k members at £40 a time is £6 million, which doesn't go far these days.
Another consequence of their heavy defeat at the 2024 GE is the relatively low amount of short money the Tories will receive. In respect of their seats and votes they will receive £4.2m per year (there's extra for travel and for the leader of the opposition's office).
By comparison, Corbyn's 2019 GE defeat still saw Labour receive £6.8m pa.
The Labour budget will send the big business donor's scurrying back to the Tories. They're not going to be worrying about money for the current cycle after Wednesday's disaster.
If Trump wins, he is going to do some stupid and dangerous shit
If he doesn't win, his supporters are going to do some stupid and dangerous shit
Either way, buckle up
What utter hysteria. He held the presidency, the most powerful political position in the world and was entirely unable to persuade anyone who had the power to do so to not confirm the elections. He managed not a single General, a single director, a governor, his own vice president, not even a local police captain to do his bidding. How on earth will he do it from the outside?
A rare occasion when I tend to agree with you. Sporadic violence is certainly possible, but Trump out of office has few levers with which to subvert the election. Not that he won't try if he thinks it possible.
And we've already seen with the (thankfully few) incidents of ballot box arson that there are those out there prepared to break the law.
He is a sore loser, and a poison to the polity, but the constitution and institutions of the USA are stronger than one man, even a crazy one like him. He has no real agenda or philosophy other than himself, and that makes him substantially less dangerous than someone with a similar personality who wants to remake the world in his image. The world and the USA was no worse for the four years he was in charge than if it had been Hillary Clinton.
He's worse now though. Jan 6th showed that.
That he failed and might again is not a reason for complacency on institutions.
A perceptive comment on the Seltzer poll. If it’s not an outlier and Iowa really is in play for the Presidential race, how come neither candidate has committed resources there during the campaign?
1. It's probably not in play BUT even if it's close it's bad news for Trump, especially in other midwest states. 2. It's the first Iowa poll with a Harris lead (see 1) 3. If Harris wins Iowa (which has only 6 EC votes), then she has almost certainly already won without Iowa, so it's a waste of resources campaigning there (538 gives Iowa a 0.1% chance of being the tipping point state).
The other aspect of the Iowa polling - big if but a valid if - is the suggestion that it will give the Dems the White House, the House and the Senate. Harris will have a very strong hand to start remedying the deadlock that has blighted government.
The new Tory leader takes charge with a tepid endorsement from her party’s members, two-thirds of her parliamentary colleagues preferring someone else and prominent names declaring that they have no desire to serve in her shadow cabinet.
In her acceptance speech, she described the task ahead as “tough”, which is an understatement. The July election was the worst result for the Conservative party, both in terms of vote share and seats won, since 1832. I am not among those who think this means the Tories can never recover. They have been pronounced dead and buried in the past only then to rise from the grave. But they are unlikely to start recovering until – and unless – they have an honest reckoning with themselves about their multiple failings in government.
Surveys suggest that very few voters think the Conservatives lost the election because they were too left wing while the majority of those with an opinion put it down to their incompetence.
One of the biggest challenges for the new leader of the opposition, and especially when the Tory parliamentary presence is so small, will be persuading voters to pay them any heed. The case made for Mrs Badenoch by her promoters is that she is “box office” with a gift for grabbing attention. What she has often failed to grasp is that there is such a thing as the wrong kind of attention. “Still in development” is the assessment of one reasonably sympathetic senior Tory.
Conservatives have displayed next to no interest in atoning for all the things voters came to loathe about them. There has never been a comprehensive repudiation of Boris Johnson for debauching standards in public life. Nor has there been an expression of suitably abject contrition for Liz Truss’s calamitous experiment with the economy. Nor have senior Tories had the humility to acknowledge that they left a super-massive black hole in the Treasury’s books. When you have fouled up as badly and as repeatedly as the Conservatives did in government, the first step to redemption with the electorate is to own your blunders and express regret for them.
Even if voters become persistently discontented with Sir Keir’s government, the Tories are delusional if they imagine that this means the public will simply collapse back into their embrace and tell the Conservatives all is forgiven. Not least because so far the Tories have been almost completely incapable of recognising how much forgiveness they will need before they are taken seriously again. If Kemi Badenoch wants to get a hearing from the British people, she is first going to have to say sorry. And she is going to have to say it a lot.
I think this is why Badenoch was the better choice. Jenrick was continuity sleaze.
Kemi's victory speech was clear that big mistakes were made by the Tories in office and that they need to have a long hard look at themselves.
Her musings in the past that WFP should be scrapped (which she rowed back on when it became Labour policy) and on Maternity pay being too generous shows a real willingness to make deep cuts to welfare and pensions in order to move to a low tax country.
I wonder if she has the courage to scrap the Triple Lock. She just might.
Badenoch’s weakness is that she is very tribal, aggressively so. The most successful politicians have the ability to look over the party horizon and sympathise without and understand voters that make other choices. She shares Corbyns disdain for the opposition. Evangelical self righteousness makes big tent politics far harder.
I think she will rub a lot of people the wrong way, particularly if she goes heavy on the social authoritarianism of the National Conservatives.
I think she is quite socially conservative herself, but the key issue is whether she wants to force that social conservatism on the rest of us, or whether she actually believes in freedom.
That's always the tricky bit for social conservatives. In theory, "I respect your freedom to go full-on Gilead in your personal life" ought to work, but in practice it doesn't. As our friends across the Atlantic are demonstrating.
I always find it interesting how vociferously left-wingers and progressive liberals argue against any pushback to their sociocultural consensus. "Stick to the economics, guys!"
Maybe they doth protest too much...
No, it's just old fashioned Liberalism. It's why I don't vote Labour or Conservative, but was swayed to vote for Cameron in 2010.
Identity politics goes against Liberalism.
That's why I oppose it.
I don't support Identity Politics.
In particular the nasty right wing populism prevalent across the world.
Yes, but you do, don't you? Provided it's the right type of identity politics, in which case you argue it isn't really anyway.
I think you may have got some of us non-right wingers wrong. Most of us couldn't really care less about taking the knee at Wembley, although we are offended by riots incited by senior politicians quoting Andrew Tate. And I couldn't really demonstrate an interest in LGBT rights.
I do have diametrically opposed opinions to yourself on certain issues but my view (probably like yours) is borne out of practicality. Take the VAT on schools issue that you keep flagging me for. Your view is you should be entitled to educate your children to the standards you desire. I agree you should, but for the privilege you should pay VAT on that lifestyle choice. I would prefer all children to have the same opportunities awarded to your children at their private school, but in a top quality state school. If the UK state sector were properly funded and as such results based on the merit of the student rather than because of their parents income the UK would ( in my view) be a richer nation.
I went to a great comprehensive school which was promoted through the will of then Education Secretary Margaret Thatcher, it was full of students whose parents could have afforded Solihull or Bromsgrove Schools but they chose not to because they didn't need to.
In order to pay for such a service a higher taxation burden is required. One question begs another and so on. But fundamentally do we want the top 7% to flourish and everyone else to flounder? I don't believe identity politics plays any part in that central theme. We would all be treated equally.
I am beginning to think that the Tory party will recover faster than most of us thought possible, The wipe out of so many Tory MPs is in some ways a benefit to Kemi. The Tories can restart with a fresh team untainted by the past issues. Jenerick's focus on Reform was a big mistake. Many of Reform's voters will never vote Tory. Remember it was the Tory party that put Tommy in jail in the first place.
Kemi needs to focus on the traditional groups of Tory voters the farmers, the small business owners and the striving middle class who want to send their kids to private schools. This along with the senior citizens can give them a base of 30-35% of the voters. The first big challenge is Scotland in May next year. I expect the Tories if Kemi delivers will do Ok and may take a couple of rural seats off the SNP.
Scotland isn't up until 2026, next year it is only shire county council seats and the odd unitary up.
Given the Tories got 36% and Labour 29% last time those seats were up in 2021 I expect both to lose seats to Reform and also but to a lesser extent the LDs and Greens and Independents
Agree. I posted earlier that I expect the Tories to lose big in Surrey (and the rest of the SE?) to the LDs, but Reform and Tories to make gains from Labour elsewhere.
After the 2025 counties the Tories will not be defending so much so will start making gains again.
If they can contain Reform, if not they risk losing some seats to Reform and the LDs even if they still gain some off Labour
Your party shouldn’t be looking to merely contain Reform, they should be looking to destroy Reform by all means possible. Britain has no need of a party of nasty racists. Your party, and all others, should be calling out every example of racism and authoritarian demagoguery, if necessary through the courts.
If Trump wins, he is going to do some stupid and dangerous shit
If he doesn't win, his supporters are going to do some stupid and dangerous shit
Either way, buckle up
What utter hysteria. He held the presidency, the most powerful political position in the world and was entirely unable to persuade anyone who had the power to do so to not confirm the elections. He managed not a single General, a single director, a governor, his own vice president, not even a local police captain to do his bidding. How on earth will he do it from the outside?
A rare occasion when I tend to agree with you. Sporadic violence is certainly possible, but Trump out of office has few levers with which to subvert the election. Not that he won't try if he thinks it possible.
And we've already seen with the (thankfully few) incidents of ballot box arson that there are those out there prepared to break the law.
He is a sore loser, and a poison to the polity, but the constitution and institutions of the USA are stronger than one man, even a crazy one like him. He has no real agenda or philosophy other than himself, and that makes him substantially less dangerous than someone with a similar personality who wants to remake the world in his image. The world and the USA was no worse for the four years he was in charge than if it had been Hillary Clinton.
He's worse now though. Jan 6th showed that.
That he failed and might again is not a reason for complacency on institutions.
So you think he went to that rally with a genuine anticipation that the people would following his speech, march down to the Capital building, break in, and somehow by force prevent the vice president from confirming the new president? You really think that? As opposed, to more likely a really bad sore loser who was acting like a child having a tantrum with no real thought process on how to achieve what he wanted.
If Trump wins, he is going to do some stupid and dangerous shit
If he doesn't win, his supporters are going to do some stupid and dangerous shit
Either way, buckle up
What utter hysteria. He held the presidency, the most powerful political position in the world and was entirely unable to persuade anyone who had the power to do so to not confirm the elections. He managed not a single General, a single director, a governor, his own vice president, not even a local police captain to do his bidding. How on earth will he do it from the outside?
It was worse. He mobilised the mob
The mob, yes some yahoos in weird costumes who again, had absolutely no power, had zero expectation or plan on what to do other than shout loudly, got carried away and ended up in the Capitol building. The sufficient punishments for those who participated last time means that isnt happening again, and the building this time will not be left exposed in the same way.
If Trump wins, he is going to do some stupid and dangerous shit
If he doesn't win, his supporters are going to do some stupid and dangerous shit
Either way, buckle up
What utter hysteria. He held the presidency, the most powerful political position in the world and was entirely unable to persuade anyone who had the power to do so to not confirm the elections. He managed not a single General, a single director, a governor, his own vice president, not even a local police captain to do his bidding. How on earth will he do it from the outside?
A rare occasion when I tend to agree with you. Sporadic violence is certainly possible, but Trump out of office has few levers with which to subvert the election. Not that he won't try if he thinks it possible.
And we've already seen with the (thankfully few) incidents of ballot box arson that there are those out there prepared to break the law.
He is a sore loser, and a poison to the polity, but the constitution and institutions of the USA are stronger than one man, even a crazy one like him. He has no real agenda or philosophy other than himself, and that makes him substantially less dangerous than someone with a similar personality who wants to remake the world in his image. The world and the USA was no worse for the four years he was in charge than if it had been Hillary Clinton.
Where we differ fundamentally is on the risks of a second Trump term. I think you're simply not recognising the extent of the preparation to assemble an administration which would further his poison, this time around.
He has a Supreme Court far more inclined than eight years ago to further the expansion of executive powers; a team devoted to the new GOP ideology - and plenty on board with their own openly anti-democracy agendas.
Would it still be chaos ? Probably.
But the chaos involved in programs like mass deportation would absolutely require significant attacks on democratic checks which now exist.
Been reading a book called 'How to fight a war' by former soldier turned Lib Dem MP Mike Martin. It's a good read, like his other book 'Why we fight', though it just cements my astonishment that human beings are capable of mass warfare, because the enormities of logistical supply are mind boggling just on the level of providing food, fuel, and underpants
Never mind any moral objections to fighting it is hard to believe we are administratively capable of such orgnisation as a species.
That we ARE capable is why 'we' won and not the Neanderthal's. Who weren't. Or indeed any of the other advanced hominid species.
Take that Homo Heidelbergensis!
Actually that there were other human specied around mere tens of thousands of years ago never ceases to blow my mind, give that advanced civilizations that we know of started to emerge 7-10 thousands years ago only.
Ah, but that's without any serious archaeology having been done on the lost lands flooded at the end of the Ice Age. Doggerland, the Persian Gulf, the vast Sunda Shelf connecting Malaysia/Indonesia (among others) would all have been above sea level 20,000 years ago.
We are missing not having @leon on this, one of his fave topics he has wrote a fairly successful novel about.
He wrote fiction about the topic and fiction was all he ever contributed to the discussion.
If the Dems on Tuesday take Iowa, Florida and Texas, the past umpty months will have been so much pointless twaddle.
The only comfort will be the whole bunch of pollsters sitting on the sidewalk with a hat and a sign asking "Buddy, can you spare a dime?"
I disagree. If Harris wins a victory like that, then -
- it was only possible with Harris, not Biden - Biden giving way was as a direct result of pressure of poor and falling polling. Which turned enough of his inner circle against him staying. - Waltz was exactly the right choice for VP
My concern with the Selzer poll - and where it potentially will be its Achilles Heel if it is wrong - is this.
From what has been said here, Selzer rings up people, doesn't weight for party registration and applies other filters, but just tell it as it is. She relies on the fact that Iowans are friendly people and generally have time to talk, and are happy to do so. She also doesn't weight for gender / age
I can see how that sort of polling methodology picks up women voters who haven't voted before and say they will vote for Harris. Going to stereotypes (bad I know), proportionally more women than men are likely to be at home, being housewives etc and so likely / willing to talk and have the time to do so.
Where I can see that type of polling methodology would be particularly bad for is polling young males, particularly incels etc who (again stereotypes) are probably less keen to speak on the phone, are too bothered on the web, playing games etc.
In previous elections, that wouldn't have mattered as the cohort didn't show much propensity to vote. But this is exactly the audience Trump and Musk have been targeting with the podcasts. And hard to see male incels being particularly enamoured of Kamala.
It is hard to say without seeing the crosstabs but my concern re reading too much into Selzer's poll is that she is missing this cohort - and if they are coming out to vote, it will screw things up/
If Trump wins, he is going to do some stupid and dangerous shit
If he doesn't win, his supporters are going to do some stupid and dangerous shit
Either way, buckle up
What utter hysteria. He held the presidency, the most powerful political position in the world and was entirely unable to persuade anyone who had the power to do so to not confirm the elections. He managed not a single General, a single director, a governor, his own vice president, not even a local police captain to do his bidding. How on earth will he do it from the outside?
Oh, so he failed therefore no problem? He can still instigate violence and disruption, that he probably wouldn't succeed is cold comfort. It's hysterical to ignore that he wanted violence, got it, and probablt wants it again if he loses.
I am not so sure that this Selzer poll is an outlier. Iowa has passed, against popular wishes, a draconian anti-abortion law. Women are pissed.
I may well be wish-projecting, but I think the pollsters have got it horribly wrong again: 1. There are no shy Trump voters. Any correction for this is wrong. Indeed, there may be GOPers who are scared to admit they are not voting for him (I see significant numbers of properties with GOP Senate race signs but no Trump signs) or scared to admit they are voting for Harris. My non-scientific hunch is this is overstating Trump by as much as 3% 2. The pollster have the wrong electorate - there is a massive surge in both woman and young voters. This too, benefits Harris.
FWIW, and I am fully prepared for the egg on my face come the end of the week, I think: 1. Harris will sweep the recognized swing states with the possible exception of AZ 2. She may well take IA and OH (abortion-related) and even, though less likely, TX 3. She could get very close in FL but I doubt it falls 4. I would not be surprised if there were some totally shocking results from States that have enacted the worst anti-abortion bills 5. GOP takes the Senate (alas), but Dems take the House.
All in all, I think it is a comfortable Harris win, with her EC range 300-420, depending on just how wrong the pollsters are.
Everyone in America has an aunt like Ann Selzer and an uncle like Nate Silver. Nate talks loudly all night long until Ann chimes in with a totally brilliant point to undermine him. (Also, Nate talks with his mouth full and Ann made all the desserts)
What a vacuous tweet. These are polls. Someone is right, someone is wrong - possibly both are wrong.
The new Tory leader takes charge with a tepid endorsement from her party’s members, two-thirds of her parliamentary colleagues preferring someone else and prominent names declaring that they have no desire to serve in her shadow cabinet.
In her acceptance speech, she described the task ahead as “tough”, which is an understatement. The July election was the worst result for the Conservative party, both in terms of vote share and seats won, since 1832. I am not among those who think this means the Tories can never recover. They have been pronounced dead and buried in the past only then to rise from the grave. But they are unlikely to start recovering until – and unless – they have an honest reckoning with themselves about their multiple failings in government.
Surveys suggest that very few voters think the Conservatives lost the election because they were too left wing while the majority of those with an opinion put it down to their incompetence.
One of the biggest challenges for the new leader of the opposition, and especially when the Tory parliamentary presence is so small, will be persuading voters to pay them any heed. The case made for Mrs Badenoch by her promoters is that she is “box office” with a gift for grabbing attention. What she has often failed to grasp is that there is such a thing as the wrong kind of attention. “Still in development” is the assessment of one reasonably sympathetic senior Tory.
Conservatives have displayed next to no interest in atoning for all the things voters came to loathe about them. There has never been a comprehensive repudiation of Boris Johnson for debauching standards in public life. Nor has there been an expression of suitably abject contrition for Liz Truss’s calamitous experiment with the economy. Nor have senior Tories had the humility to acknowledge that they left a super-massive black hole in the Treasury’s books. When you have fouled up as badly and as repeatedly as the Conservatives did in government, the first step to redemption with the electorate is to own your blunders and express regret for them.
Even if voters become persistently discontented with Sir Keir’s government, the Tories are delusional if they imagine that this means the public will simply collapse back into their embrace and tell the Conservatives all is forgiven. Not least because so far the Tories have been almost completely incapable of recognising how much forgiveness they will need before they are taken seriously again. If Kemi Badenoch wants to get a hearing from the British people, she is first going to have to say sorry. And she is going to have to say it a lot.
I think this is why Badenoch was the better choice. Jenrick was continuity sleaze.
Kemi's victory speech was clear that big mistakes were made by the Tories in office and that they need to have a long hard look at themselves.
Her musings in the past that WFP should be scrapped (which she rowed back on when it became Labour policy) and on Maternity pay being too generous shows a real willingness to make deep cuts to welfare and pensions in order to move to a low tax country.
I wonder if she has the courage to scrap the Triple Lock. She just might.
Badenoch’s weakness is that she is very tribal, aggressively so. The most successful politicians have the ability to look over the party horizon and sympathise without and understand voters that make other choices. She shares Corbyns disdain for the opposition. Evangelical self righteousness makes big tent politics far harder.
Kemi is more agnostic Catholic than evangelical. Her husband Hamish is Roman Catholic.
“My mother’s father. My paternal grandmother was a Muslim, though to be fair she did convert in later life. My family’s sort of Anglican and Methodist. My maternal grandfather was a Methodist reverend.”
ConHome: “And where did he practice?”
Badenoch: “In Nigeria. I was born here [in Wimbledon], but I call myself first generation, because I grew up in Nigeria and I chose to come back here. So I’m agnostic really, but I was brought up with cultural Christian values.”
ConHome: “Have you had your children baptised?”
Badenoch: “Yes, because I’m married to a Catholic [she and Hamish Badenoch, whose mother emigrated from Ireland, have two children].”
ConHome: “They’re being brought up as Catholics, are they?”
Nominal Roman Catholic, with Anglican quantities of Fudge.
This is interesting:
My paternal grandmother was a Muslim, though to be fair she did convert in later life. My family’s sort of Anglican and Methodist. My maternal grandfather was a Methodist reverend.
Both her parents were Yoruba, which is (roughly or in part - open to correction on details) a large but not dominant tribe which went from traditional African religion to part Muslim, predominantly Christian, is mainly urban, was on the winning side in the Biafran War, and in the past was active as slavers. The new religion would incorporate elements of the old, usually.
Fascinating mix. Heritage formed mainly in the 1910 to 1940 period by the look of it.
Slavers you say? Even less keen on reparations than your average right wing Tory then.
The nature of the African Slave Trade was that coastal tribes were sometimes middlemen, where they would raid other tribes and sell their captives to the European slave traders, or would take members of other tribes as slaves as tribute.
The Yoruba wiki article mentions both Yoruba enslaved, and the Yoruba as enslavers. Some major places were built on a slave economy, such as (not Yoruba but an example) Kano. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoruba_people
It's not really my specialist subject, so I tend to limit comments to pointing out that it is more complicated than "reparations NOW, paid to US, NOW" or "nothing to do with us, Guv".
I'm quite impressed with how Justin Welby and CofE are dealing with it, over a period of years and carefully, for the longer term.
So if there are serious signs of a move to Harris, will Trump have a serious talk with his advisers about toning it down and looking presidential for the next couple of days or b) GO FULL TONTO?
You have to ask? Would a man capable of a) have done...well, pretty much anything he does?
He does cheat on his wives, which is pretty presidential behaviour admittedly.
'Ok sir, but could we cut down on the mock fellatio on mics stuff?'
That was maximum yuck. This is not a guy any decent person would want in their house let alone vote for as president. Regardless of the result I remain flabbergasted and not a little perturbed that he's on the ballot.
Kemi Badenoch says she would reverse the introduction of VAT on private school fees.
Labour popping champagne corks.
Superb news, and quite right too.
Education is a public good, which benefits us all. Small independent schools aren't businesses making returns for shareholders but charities helping to educate our children.
A lot of the smaller ones are businesses, because it's quite hard to manage e.g. banking systems via a charity and compliance is a pain.
It's the larger ones - which will be essentially unaffected by this - that are charities.
The new Tory leader takes charge with a tepid endorsement from her party’s members, two-thirds of her parliamentary colleagues preferring someone else and prominent names declaring that they have no desire to serve in her shadow cabinet.
In her acceptance speech, she described the task ahead as “tough”, which is an understatement. The July election was the worst result for the Conservative party, both in terms of vote share and seats won, since 1832. I am not among those who think this means the Tories can never recover. They have been pronounced dead and buried in the past only then to rise from the grave. But they are unlikely to start recovering until – and unless – they have an honest reckoning with themselves about their multiple failings in government.
Surveys suggest that very few voters think the Conservatives lost the election because they were too left wing while the majority of those with an opinion put it down to their incompetence.
One of the biggest challenges for the new leader of the opposition, and especially when the Tory parliamentary presence is so small, will be persuading voters to pay them any heed. The case made for Mrs Badenoch by her promoters is that she is “box office” with a gift for grabbing attention. What she has often failed to grasp is that there is such a thing as the wrong kind of attention. “Still in development” is the assessment of one reasonably sympathetic senior Tory.
Conservatives have displayed next to no interest in atoning for all the things voters came to loathe about them. There has never been a comprehensive repudiation of Boris Johnson for debauching standards in public life. Nor has there been an expression of suitably abject contrition for Liz Truss’s calamitous experiment with the economy. Nor have senior Tories had the humility to acknowledge that they left a super-massive black hole in the Treasury’s books. When you have fouled up as badly and as repeatedly as the Conservatives did in government, the first step to redemption with the electorate is to own your blunders and express regret for them.
Even if voters become persistently discontented with Sir Keir’s government, the Tories are delusional if they imagine that this means the public will simply collapse back into their embrace and tell the Conservatives all is forgiven. Not least because so far the Tories have been almost completely incapable of recognising how much forgiveness they will need before they are taken seriously again. If Kemi Badenoch wants to get a hearing from the British people, she is first going to have to say sorry. And she is going to have to say it a lot.
I think this is why Badenoch was the better choice. Jenrick was continuity sleaze.
Kemi's victory speech was clear that big mistakes were made by the Tories in office and that they need to have a long hard look at themselves.
Her musings in the past that WFP should be scrapped (which she rowed back on when it became Labour policy) and on Maternity pay being too generous shows a real willingness to make deep cuts to welfare and pensions in order to move to a low tax country.
I wonder if she has the courage to scrap the Triple Lock. She just might.
Badenoch’s weakness is that she is very tribal, aggressively so. The most successful politicians have the ability to look over the party horizon and sympathise without and understand voters that make other choices. She shares Corbyns disdain for the opposition. Evangelical self righteousness makes big tent politics far harder.
Kemi is more agnostic Catholic than evangelical. Her husband Hamish is Roman Catholic.
“My mother’s father. My paternal grandmother was a Muslim, though to be fair she did convert in later life. My family’s sort of Anglican and Methodist. My maternal grandfather was a Methodist reverend.”
ConHome: “And where did he practice?”
Badenoch: “In Nigeria. I was born here [in Wimbledon], but I call myself first generation, because I grew up in Nigeria and I chose to come back here. So I’m agnostic really, but I was brought up with cultural Christian values.”
ConHome: “Have you had your children baptised?”
Badenoch: “Yes, because I’m married to a Catholic [she and Hamish Badenoch, whose mother emigrated from Ireland, have two children].”
ConHome: “They’re being brought up as Catholics, are they?”
I mean she doesn’t believe in God. So the rest is gravy. Let’s not go there again. First time we have had atheists leading both big parties.
No, agnostics are not atheists and as she is married to a Roman Catholic and bringing up her children as Roman Catholic she is more religious than secular atheist. Even Starmer while an atheist, not even agnostic, is married to a Jewish lady and bringing up his children Jewish.
Cleverly was an atheist too but was knocked out in the MPs round
There's a difference between religion-as-culture and religion-as-belief. I realise England is the country that invented Anglicanism to give agnostics a nice place to sit, but even so belief is the dividing line
Agnostics by definition neither don't believe in God or have belief in God, they are like Independent swing voters on religion and often culturally religious even if not believers.
Atheists are anti religion as well as not believing in God, active religious believe in God and are culturally religious and worshippers too
The new Tory leader takes charge with a tepid endorsement from her party’s members, two-thirds of her parliamentary colleagues preferring someone else and prominent names declaring that they have no desire to serve in her shadow cabinet.
In her acceptance speech, she described the task ahead as “tough”, which is an understatement. The July election was the worst result for the Conservative party, both in terms of vote share and seats won, since 1832. I am not among those who think this means the Tories can never recover. They have been pronounced dead and buried in the past only then to rise from the grave. But they are unlikely to start recovering until – and unless – they have an honest reckoning with themselves about their multiple failings in government.
Surveys suggest that very few voters think the Conservatives lost the election because they were too left wing while the majority of those with an opinion put it down to their incompetence.
One of the biggest challenges for the new leader of the opposition, and especially when the Tory parliamentary presence is so small, will be persuading voters to pay them any heed. The case made for Mrs Badenoch by her promoters is that she is “box office” with a gift for grabbing attention. What she has often failed to grasp is that there is such a thing as the wrong kind of attention. “Still in development” is the assessment of one reasonably sympathetic senior Tory.
Conservatives have displayed next to no interest in atoning for all the things voters came to loathe about them. There has never been a comprehensive repudiation of Boris Johnson for debauching standards in public life. Nor has there been an expression of suitably abject contrition for Liz Truss’s calamitous experiment with the economy. Nor have senior Tories had the humility to acknowledge that they left a super-massive black hole in the Treasury’s books. When you have fouled up as badly and as repeatedly as the Conservatives did in government, the first step to redemption with the electorate is to own your blunders and express regret for them.
Even if voters become persistently discontented with Sir Keir’s government, the Tories are delusional if they imagine that this means the public will simply collapse back into their embrace and tell the Conservatives all is forgiven. Not least because so far the Tories have been almost completely incapable of recognising how much forgiveness they will need before they are taken seriously again. If Kemi Badenoch wants to get a hearing from the British people, she is first going to have to say sorry. And she is going to have to say it a lot.
I think this is why Badenoch was the better choice. Jenrick was continuity sleaze.
Kemi's victory speech was clear that big mistakes were made by the Tories in office and that they need to have a long hard look at themselves.
Her musings in the past that WFP should be scrapped (which she rowed back on when it became Labour policy) and on Maternity pay being too generous shows a real willingness to make deep cuts to welfare and pensions in order to move to a low tax country.
I wonder if she has the courage to scrap the Triple Lock. She just might.
Badenoch’s weakness is that she is very tribal, aggressively so. The most successful politicians have the ability to look over the party horizon and sympathise without and understand voters that make other choices. She shares Corbyns disdain for the opposition. Evangelical self righteousness makes big tent politics far harder.
Kemi is more agnostic Catholic than evangelical. Her husband Hamish is Roman Catholic.
“My mother’s father. My paternal grandmother was a Muslim, though to be fair she did convert in later life. My family’s sort of Anglican and Methodist. My maternal grandfather was a Methodist reverend.”
ConHome: “And where did he practice?”
Badenoch: “In Nigeria. I was born here [in Wimbledon], but I call myself first generation, because I grew up in Nigeria and I chose to come back here. So I’m agnostic really, but I was brought up with cultural Christian values.”
ConHome: “Have you had your children baptised?”
Badenoch: “Yes, because I’m married to a Catholic [she and Hamish Badenoch, whose mother emigrated from Ireland, have two children].”
ConHome: “They’re being brought up as Catholics, are they?”
I mean she doesn’t believe in God. So the rest is gravy. Let’s not go there again. First time we have had atheists leading both big parties.
No, agnostics are not atheists and as she is married to a Roman Catholic and bringing up her children as Roman Catholic she is more religious than secular atheist. Even Starmer while an atheist, not even agnostic, is married to a Jewish lady and bringing up his children Jewish.
Cleverly was an atheist too but was knocked out in the MPs round
There's a difference between religion-as-culture and religion-as-belief. I realise England is the country that invented Anglicanism to give agnostics a nice place to sit, but even so belief is the dividing line
Agnostics by definition neither don't believe in God or have belief in God, they are like Independent swing voters on religion and often culturally religious even if not believers.
Atheists are anti religion as well as not believing in God, active religious believe in God and are culturally religious and worshippers too
Agnostics generally don’t do religion, however. They might go to Xmas carols, but atheists do that too. They are functionally closer to atheists.
No they aren't, most atheists never go to any religious service on principle
Comments
JUST IN: Vice Pres. Kamala Harris has 49% support among likely voters and former Pres. Donald Trump has 46%, according to final-weekend @ABC News/Ipsos poll.
https://x.com/ABC/status/1853044995332211113
It's quite reminiscent of Rishi Sunak.
📊 Final Swing States Poll by NYT/Siena
NORTH CAROLINA
🟦 Harris: 48% (+2)
🟥 Trump: 46%
—
GEORGIA
🟦 Harris: 48% (+1)
🟥 Trump: 47%
—
WISCONSIN
🟦 Harris: 49% (+2)
🟥 Harris: 47%
—
NEVADA
🟦 Harris: 49% (+3)
🟥 Trump: 46%
—
MICHIGAN
🟦 Harris: 47% (=)
🟥 Trump: 47%
—
PENNSYLVANIA
🟥 Trump: 48% (=)
🟦 Harris: 48%
—
ARIZONA
🟥 Trump: 49% (+4)
🟦 Harris: 45%
https://x.com/IAPolls2022/status/1853016276655898841
@amy_hoggart
Everyone in America has an aunt like Ann Selzer and an uncle like Nate Silver. Nate talks loudly all night long until Ann chimes in with a totally brilliant point to undermine him. (Also, Nate talks with his mouth full and Ann made all the desserts)
https://www.langerresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/1218a12020ElectionUpdate.pdf
Which is pretty much what you've just pointed out in relation to Gregg Levine's comment on Selzer.
Interesting.
Cleverly was an atheist too but was knocked out in the MPs round
It is still a bit all over the place, there have been a few polls now saying Nevada for the Democrats after a lot of positive talk for the Republicans there, and a few with NC in play, even as Arizona has had several going more strongly GOP than expected. With Pennsylvania and Michigan, the absolute keys, deadlocked.
If he doesn't win, his supporters are going to do some stupid and dangerous shit
Either way, buckle up
And one final thought: she's run an excellent campaign, well beyond my expectations - and the unity of the Democrats has been truly impressive. Trump has really served to focus minds.
There will have been a massive plan developed since January 6th 2021. Democracy isn't going to stand for that shit a second time.
Atheists are anti religion as well as not believing in God, active religious believe in God and are culturally religious and worshippers too
Inject this into my veins.
Hence, apparently, the prevalence of australisian flora and fauna in papua new guina, but asian flora and fauna in the rest of the archipelago at the Sundalands.
Edit: Also, I initially read that as you saying you were not there at the time - we know you are experienced, but not that much, Your Majesty!
Probably not her.
The harder aim would be to get power and also to attend to the questions. That is, what do Tories believe, what are their USPs, what sort of society do they aim at, is it attainable, if so how, what is the long term action required on tax, borrow and spend, what exactly is the state going to stop doing, how do we do post-Brexit properly, etc.
The LDs could help themselves and us by doing all this first, and Labour is offering them a window to do so by communicating so badly.
UN report indicates militia fighters are attempting to wipe out non-Arab ethnic groups in the region
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/nov/03/we-will-make-you-have-arab-babies-fears-of-genocide-amid-and-torture-in-sudans-darfur
Instead, the two armies agreed to oust the dictator, then had a civil war anyway. Horrific for the people.
Edited: *prevent, not present.
'Estimates among Hispanic likely voters have been stable in three of the past four ABC/Ipsos polls, in mid-September, early October and this one, averaging 55-41%, Harris-Trump (54-39% in this poll). Last week's 64-34% among Hispanic likely voters was different, although it approximated the result in the 2020 exit poll, 65-32%, Biden-Trump....
Harris, who's tried to attract disaffected Republicans, has 7% support in that group, while 3% of Democrats support Trump. Harris also wins support from 11% of conservatives, vs. Trump's 4% among liberals.
Independents – who've gone with the winner in nine of the last 12 presidential elections – are now +5 for Harris, 49-44%, although that's not a significant difference. Harris leads by 55-37% among independent women, while it's close, 49-45%, Trump-Harris, among independent men.
Harris has support from 76% of Black men in these results (Biden won 79% of this group in 2020) and 87% of Black women.
The race is close – a non-significant Trump +4 – among white women, 50-46%, a group he won by 11 points in 2020. A Democrat hasn't won white women since 1996, though Al Gore came within a whisker in 2000. Trump leads by 13 points among white men, 54-41%.
Harris has an especially wide lead among women age 18-29, 69-29%. That compares with a non-significant Trump +5 among men that age, 49-44%.
Harris is maintaining a lead among suburban women, 55-40%, while the contest remains close among suburban men, 49-46%, Trump-Harris.
The gender gap among all likely voters is 16 points – a non-significant Trump +5 among men, 50-45%, Harris +11 among women, 53-42%. That's similar to where it's been, as well as similar to the average (19 points) in exit polls since 1996.
Trump has almost identical leads among non-college white men (63-33%) and non-college white women (62-33%) alike. Among all likely voters who don't have at least a four-year degree, it's Trump +11 points (53-42%); among college graduates, Harris +22 (59-37%).
In a group that's central to Republican prospects, Trump leads by 80-16% among white evangelical Protestants. Among all likely voters who are not white evangelical Protestants, it's Harris over Trump, 55-40%.
The seven battleground states, taken together, look like the nation: A 49-46%, Harris-Trump contest.'
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/election-stays-close-final-weekend-dispirited-electorate-poll/story?id=115278707&cid=social_twitter_abcn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election#Voter_demographics
Edited extra bit: Albon's car was comprehensively trashed. Not too surprising he isn't starting but very bad for Williams with Ocon doing so well.
But in the UK it's different.
Sporadic violence is certainly possible, but Trump out of office has few levers with which to subvert the election.
Not that he won't try if he thinks it possible.
And we've already seen with the (thankfully few) incidents of ballot box arson that there are those out there prepared to break the law.
NYT/Siena on downballot races:
AZ-Sen: 🔵Gallego +5 (50-45)
(was 🔵D+7)
MI-Sen: 🔵Slotkin +1 (48-46)
(was 🔵D+5)
NV-Sen: 🔵Rosen +9 (52-43)
(was 🔵D+9)
NC-Gov: 🔵Stein +17 (56-38)
(was 🔵D+10)
PA-Sen: 🔵Casey +5 (50-45)
(was 🔵D+4)
WI-Sen: 🔵Baldwin +4 (50-46)
(was 🔵D+7)
https://x.com/admcrlsn/status/1853045895949853115
Account published in a book, for which Trump did not sue.
The part of the book that caused the most controversy concerns Trump’s divorce from his first wife, Ivana. Hurt obtained a copy of her sworn divorce deposition, from 1990, in which she stated that, the previous year, her husband had raped her in a fit of rage. In Hurt’s account, Trump was furious that a “scalp reduction” operation he’d undergone to eliminate a bald spot had been unexpectedly painful. Ivana had recommended the plastic surgeon.
In retaliation, Hurt wrote, Trump yanked out a handful of his wife’s hair, and then forced himself on her sexually. Afterward, according to the book, she spent the night locked in a bedroom, crying; in the morning, Trump asked her, “with menacing casualness, ‘Does it hurt?’ ” Trump has denied both the rape allegation and the suggestion that he had a scalp-reduction procedure. Hurt said that the incident, which is detailed in Ivana’s deposition, was confirmed by two of her friends.
https://archive.ph/kLseM#selection-735.0-735.932
Quoted from the Net Yorker.
The world and the USA was no worse for the four years he was in charge than if it had been Hillary Clinton.
I may well be wish-projecting, but I think the pollsters have got it horribly wrong again:
1. There are no shy Trump voters. Any correction for this is wrong. Indeed, there may be GOPers who are scared to admit they are not voting for him (I see significant numbers of properties with GOP Senate race signs but no Trump signs) or scared to admit they are voting for Harris. My non-scientific hunch is this is overstating Trump by as much as 3%
2. The pollster have the wrong electorate - there is a massive surge in both woman and young voters. This too, benefits Harris.
Check out this projection from a Gen-Z organization getting out the first-time eligible voters: https://x.com/voterstomorrow/status/1852437651934126526?s=61
FWIW, and I am fully prepared for the egg on my face come the end of the week, I think:
1. Harris will sweep the recognized swing states with the possible exception of AZ
2. She may well take IA and OH (abortion-related) and even, though less likely, TX
3. She could get very close in FL but I doubt it falls
4. I would not be surprised if there were some totally shocking results from States that have enacted the worst anti-abortion bills
5. GOP takes the Senate (alas), but Dems take the House.
All in all, I think it is a comfortable Harris win, with her EC range 300-420, depending on just how wrong the pollsters are.
The only comfort will be the whole bunch of pollsters sitting on the sidewalk with a hat and a sign asking "Buddy, can you spare a dime?"
That he failed and might again is not a reason for complacency on institutions.
NEW THREAD
You really think that? As opposed, to more likely a really bad sore loser who was acting like a child having a tantrum with no real thought process on how to achieve what he wanted.
https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/dashboard/ballot-tracker-status-of-abortion-related-state-constitutional-amendment-measures/
I think you're simply not recognising the extent of the preparation to assemble an administration which would further his poison, this time around.
He has a Supreme Court far more inclined than eight years ago to further the expansion of executive powers; a team devoted to the new GOP ideology - and plenty on board with their own openly anti-democracy agendas.
Would it still be chaos ? Probably.
But the chaos involved in programs like mass deportation would absolutely require significant attacks on democratic checks which now exist.
- it was only possible with Harris, not Biden
- Biden giving way was as a direct result of pressure of poor and falling polling. Which turned enough of his inner circle against him staying.
- Waltz was exactly the right choice for VP
From what has been said here, Selzer rings up people, doesn't weight for party registration and applies other filters, but just tell it as it is. She relies on the fact that Iowans are friendly people and generally have time to talk, and are happy to do so. She also doesn't weight for gender / age
I can see how that sort of polling methodology picks up women voters who haven't voted before and say they will vote for Harris. Going to stereotypes (bad I know), proportionally more women than men are likely to be at home, being housewives etc and so likely / willing to talk and have the time to do so.
Where I can see that type of polling methodology would be particularly bad for is polling young males, particularly incels etc who (again stereotypes) are probably less keen to speak on the phone, are too bothered on the web, playing games etc.
In previous elections, that wouldn't have mattered as the cohort didn't show much propensity to vote. But this is exactly the audience Trump and Musk have been targeting with the podcasts. And hard to see male incels being particularly enamoured of Kamala.
It is hard to say without seeing the crosstabs but my concern re reading too much into Selzer's poll is that she is missing this cohort - and if they are coming out to vote, it will screw things up/
The Yoruba wiki article mentions both Yoruba enslaved, and the Yoruba as enslavers. Some major places were built on a slave economy, such as (not Yoruba but an example) Kano.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoruba_people
It's not really my specialist subject, so I tend to limit comments to pointing out that it is more complicated than "reparations NOW, paid to US, NOW" or "nothing to do with us, Guv".
I'm quite impressed with how Justin Welby and CofE are dealing with it, over a period of years and carefully, for the longer term.
It's the larger ones - which will be essentially unaffected by this - that are charities.