Ahead of the second presidential debate tonight, it’s worth taking stock of the task facing each candidate in the last three weeks of the campaign. It is clear that Mitt Romney has received a sizeable bounce since the first debate, closing the gap to Barack Obama by probably around 4 points nationally. Nevertheless, it looks
Inflation in the year (on the Consumer Prices Index) to September was 2.2 per cent, down from 2.5 per cent in August. On the Retail Prices Index, it was 2.6 per cent in September, down from 2.9 per cent. This puts inflation at its lowest level since the end of 2009, and close to the
In their first poll conducted fully after all the party conferences, YouGov once again tested what difference replacing David Cameron with Boris Johnson would have on the Conservatives’ poll rating. As in their previous two attempts in September, YouGov’s numbers show Boris narrowing the gap to Labour by seven points: with Cameron as leader, the
Just as Ed Miliband seemed to get a poll bounce from his conference speech last week, so David Cameron seems to have got one from his on Wednesday. On YouGov’s question of who would make the best Prime Minister, Cameron has extended his lead to 14 points. That more than reverses the bump Miliband got
The question after last week’s presidential debate was not who had won — there was a clear consensus that Mitt Romney had got the better of Barack Obama — but how much difference it would make to the race. Going into the debate on Wednesday night, Obama was the clear favourite to win re-election, with
Growth forecast downgrades should come as no surprise these days, but when they come from the IMF they naturally command a fair bit of attention. In fact, the IMF’s downgrades for annual GDP change — to -0.4 per cent in 2012 (from +0.2) and +1.1 per cent in 2013 (from +1.4) — simply bring them
Labour leave Manchester today with a 14-point poll lead over the Conservatives, according to YouGov. That’s their biggest lead in a YouGov poll since June, although one last week showed them 13 points ahead, so we shouldn’t rush into declaring a big conference bounce for them. It does seem, though, that Ed Miliband himself did
OK, cards on the table: I’m a big Obama fan. I desperately hope he wins next month, and I’m reasonably confident he will. But even to my biased eye, he clearly put in the weaker performance of last night’s debate. He knew his stuff, and had plenty of good points, but threw them out in
‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’ That was the question Ronald Reagan told Americans to ask themselves when choosing their President in 1980, and it’s a line Mitt Romney’s campaign has been hoping would work for them this time around. ‘The president can say a lot of things, but he can’t
Listening to Ed Miliband’s conference speech, I was stuck by the similarity of one section of it to that of another speech given by someone else who’s taught at Harvard: law professor Elizabeth Warren. Today, in Manchester, Miliband spoke of ‘the system’ not working in much the same way as Warren — now running for
Today’s public finance statistics are another case of good news/bad news for the government. First, the good news: the ONS revised down its estimate for government borrowing in the last fiscal year (2011/12) from £125 billion to £119.3 billion. That’s £6.7 billion below the OBR’s estimate in March this year, and means that the coalition
It’s becoming clear which will be the battleground states of the 2012 US Presidential election. With less than seven weeks to go, just nine states look competitive: Colorado and Nevada in the Southwest; Iowa, Ohio and Wisconsin in the Midwest; Florida, North Carolina and Virginia in the South; and New Hampshire in the Northeast. Of
Over the past two days, we’ve had polls from four different pollsters, and all of them show big leads for Labour. Yesterday, Populus gave Ed Miliband’s party a 15-point lead — the largest lead the pollster has ever shown for Labour. Today, Ipsos MORI shows Labour ahead by 11 points and TNS BMRB have them
When I looked at the battle for the United States Senate back in July, I said it’d be tough for the Democrats to retain control. But since then — and particularly since the party conventions — things have begun to look up for their candidates in a number of key races. In Missouri, where incumbent
‘Support for an increase in public spending rises.’ That’s the headline generated by the latest British Social Attitudes survey results, out today. They show that the proportion of the population saying that the government should ‘increase taxes and spend more’ rose from 31 per cent in 2010 to 36 per cent in 2011 — the
Much is being made today of reports that George Osborne will drop his fiscal target in his autumn statement on 5 December. Isabel reported earlier that, faced with breaking his own rule, Osborne will abandon it rather than implement more cuts to meet it. All the fuss seems to stem from a note by Citi
Employment has almost entirely recovered to its pre-recession peak, according to today’s new figures. Total employment for May to July stood at 29.56 million — up 236,000 on the previous three months and just 12,000 shy of the 29.57 million peak of April 2008. This recovery is thanks to the expansion of the private sector,
Alok Sharma has been appointed Tory vice chairman and charged with improving the party’s standing among ethnic minority voters. He certainly has a big task ahead of him. According to the Ethnic Minority British Election Study, the Conservatives received just 16 per cent of the ethnic minority vote in 2010, to Labour’s 68 per cent.
In America, the convention duel is over and there can now be little doubt that Barack Obama won it. Whereas Mitt Romney saw only a very modest boost in his polling numbers during the Republican convention, Obama has received a much bigger bounce, not only wiping out any advantage Romney gained the previous week, but
US party conventions aren’t just about that year’s elections. Sure, the biggest speeches are from the Presidential nominees, their spouses and their running mates — but plenty of others take to the podiums as well. And while the content of their remarks may be all about beating the other guys in November, a fair few
