Us politics

Some well-informed people — Rupert Murdoch among them — have suggested that Mitt Romney could exploit Obama’s increasingly fractious relationship with America’s Catholics to win the presidential elections in November. The so-called ‘Catholic vote’ is often said to be the crucial swing factor in American democracy. Romney, however, may be facing a bigger socio-religious stumbling block than Obama’s: evangelicals. They don’t like him. Mainstream Protestant Republicans in the north have plumped for Mitt, generally speaking, but he has been far less successful in the evangelical south. ‘As a county’s evangelical population expands,’ says Real Clear Politics analyst Sean Trende, ‘Romney’s vote share declines.’ The obvious explanation is that southern Baptists

As Pete says, Obama fired some well-aimed arrows in the direction of Mitt Romney in his State of the Union address. But it was also a clear attempt to outline Obama’s re-election message, which would, I think, be the same no matter who he faces in November. The idea is to stress that Obama, unlike the corrupt Republicans who nearly bankrupted America, is a ‘fair shake’ candidate, who stands for hard work and responsibility. It is hypocritical rubbish, as I tried to point out last month. The idea of Obama as the straight-shooting, anti-corruption candidate is absurd. President Obama has proved to be a very different politician to the progressive

They said South Carolina would be Mitt Romney’s big test. Tonight, he failed it. The networks have called the primary for Newt Gingrich, and CNN’s exit poll shows him beating Romney 38-29. It’s an astounding turnaround, considering that Romney led by around 10 points just a few days ago. The Romney campaign is already trying to claim it’s not too disappointed by the result – that a few weeks ago they would have been happy with third place, that it’s Florida that really matters. But the truth is, he’s suffered a big upset. After it looked like he’d won Iowa and he took a solid if unsurprising win in New Hampshire,

When the week began, the idea of anyone but Mitt Romney claiming victory in tonight’s South Carolina primary seemed fanciful. He had a 10 point lead in the polls, giving him a 90 per cent chance of victory according to Nate Silver’s model. Any talk of someone else winning sounded like the wild hopes of a media keen for the nomination battle to go on as long as possible. But no longer. As I said on Thursday, it’s been a particularly bad week for Romney and a particularly good one for Newt Gingrich. Gingrich even managed to turn the one thing that seemed likely to halt his momentum – an

Of course, Mitt Romney hasn’t secured the Republican nomination yet. But now that the bookies have him odds on at 1/9, it’s definitely worth thinking about how he’d shape up against Barack Obama. Does he have much of a chance? Well, yes, actually. The head-to-head polls so far point to a close fight between Obama and Romney. And Obama’s approval ratings and GDP growth forecasts — better predictors of the result at this stage — also point to a very tight election. It’s shaping up to be one of those elections where the key to victory is not the national popular vote, but the Electoral College. It’ll be winning each individual

Tonight’s New Hampshire primary is very unlikely to provide the sort of razor-thin margin we saw in Iowa last week. Mitt Romney looks assured of a comfortable win – Nate Silver’s poll-based model (above) gives him a 98 per cent chance of victory. If one of the others did somehow beat him, it’d be the biggest upset of any modern US primary. The only real questions are just how comfortable it’ll be (20 points? 30? or just 10?), and who will come second. The polls suggest the battle for runner-up will be between Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman. Paul is the favourite to take it, but the momentum of the