Danny

Exit polls have Clinton winning North Carolina, Ohio neck-and-neck. EDIT: To be specific, Trump projected to win Ohio by 0.2%.

CNN claiming a "top Trump adviser" is saying it would take a miracle for them to win.

Apparently the exit poll has Clinton just 1% behind in Georgia. That will be good news, IF true.

Well, she did when she was secretary of state, but she generally had poor ratings when she was First Lady (which she did essentially turn into an official "office"), apart from a brief surge during the Lewinsky scandal.

I have Clinton winning 272-266, with Trump flipping Iowa, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania, but Clinton very narrowly holding onto Florida and New Hampshire for the win (though with the margins close enough in those states for Trump and some of his more demented followers to whine about rigging forevermore). In some ways, the reported big increase in Latino turnout is a worry for the Democrats -- it helps them in a couple of swing states like Nevada and Florida, but generally, most of those extra Latino votes are going to be "wasted" in Texas and California, which doesn't help her at all with the Electoral College.

Well, it depends what you mean by "defining factor". I don't think racism was the reason she got most of her votes in 2008. But I do think it was the one factor that turned her candidacy from a Bernie Sanders-type showing, into a down-to-the-wire fight (which, going back to your point, was the argument for Hillary supposedly being a good politician).

If working-class white voters were voting positively for Clinton back in 2008 (rather than just voting to stop the black man), then why did Clinton do/is doing so badly with those very same voters in the primaries/election this year? (Indeed, generally speaking, a lot of the states that went strongest for Clinton in 2008 are likely to be the strongest states for Trump this time - that says a lot).

It's also forgotten that one of the main things that helped Clinton push Obama so hard in 2008 was that she picked up the votes of racist white voters' whose main priority was just to stop the black candidate. A literal JAIL INMATE managed to come close to beating Obama in the West Virginia primary in 2012, so the idea that people there (and in similar states) were positively voting for Clinton in 2008, rather than just casting a default anti-Obama vote, isn't very convincing. Any semi-decent politician would've done the exact same. No matter how intelligent Clinton undoubtedly is, and however good a president she might arguably be if/when she gets there, she is just a God-awful politician. She's not a good speaker, she's not good at engaging an audience or getting their attention - that means the "average voter" doesn't really listen to her when she comes on TV or whatever, and so the only things they hear about her are the hysterical caricatures coming from her opponents (similar to Ed Miliband last year). As much as some people are saying the opposition Clinton gets is unfair, Obama got worse than this treatment - in the days before the 2008 election, Sarah Palin was going to every rally dog-whistling about how he "palled around with terrorists" and "doesn't see America like *WE* [translation: white people] see America". But that didn't matter because Obama was a talented enough politician to get people to see and hear who he really was. Clinton doesn't have that talent, she doesn't get people to pay attention to what she's actually saying or who she actually is in the way Obama does, so there's nothing that reaches the public's ears that goes contrary to the image that the Republicans are painting of her.

Oh come on, you must be allowing yourself serious selective amnesia about the 2010-15 period. These people were all squealing in horror just at the suggestion of rich people having to pay a bit more tax, or the suggestion that energy companies should drop their prices --- you really think they would've been sanguine about the idea of a Labour government letting workers overrule their bosses (the so-called "wealth creators"), giving the average employee pay rises, and capping the pay packets of the top guns? You really think that wouldn't've provoked the usual round of taunts about how it was "Marxist", "anti-business", "anti-aspiration", "a recipe for unproductivity", "scaring the wealth creators overseas"? And you really think Miliband wouldn't've caved in, despite having a record of ALWAYS doing so whenever he was faced with those kind of attacks? :lol: Yes, in the brief period where it seemed like Murdoch was toast in the midst of the huge public uproar at Milly Dowler's phone being hacked, so Miliband thought he could safely jump on the bandwagon without any risks. Yet both before and after that period, when it was obvious Miliband would actually have something to lose by standing up and saying something, his backbone was MIA as usual.

Because it would've provoked the usual squealing from the Tories, the press, the CBI, Blair and Mandelson, about how it was "anti-business" and would "destroy the economy". Before you know it, Ed Balls and Chuka Umunna would've been demanding a U-turn, and Miliband would've caved in within about a week. (Also, the idea that Miliband was "brave" in taking on Murdoch is nonsense -- for the first year he was leader, he sucked up to them endlessly and didn't say anything about the phone-hacking scandal, he only spoke out after the Milly Dowler story broke when he thought it was a sure thing that Murdoch was finished in Britain, and then when it turned out that Murdoch was staying, Miliband as usual caved in and went back to doing free promo stunts for them.)

When did Miliband regularly talk about "curbing excessive pay in the private sector", and regularly talk in as blunt terms about "corporate irresponsibility"? Hell, even with the workers in boardrooms thing, Miliband was barely mentioning that by the end, Chuka Umunna (who would've been responsible in this area) certainly wasn't talking about it, and I really don't see that it would've happened if Labour had won last year. And the problem is? Maybe then, to fill the hole, maybe politicians will be forced to build a different economic model, one which isn't just geared towards the international mega-rich and a tiny sliver of the British upper-middle-class.

The people who are now saying leaving "the Single Market" will be a disaster are largely the same people who said there would be an immediate economic shock and market crash straight in the aftermath of a Brexit vote, even before the formal process started. Not to mention they were talking about "extra charges" and "increases at the checkout" if we stayed out of the Euro all those years ago. ** Anywho, allowing myself to get steadily more optimistic about May. I did fear at first her talk about being for the ordinary person and finally ending big business fatcats' destructive hold on our economy was just the type of bullshit that Cameron and Osborne spun, but the fact she's saying it so often, and starting to back it up with some concrete policies, presumably means she really is serious. If the Labour "centrists" had any self-awareness, they'd be questioning why a Tory PM is coming out with a more left-wing agenda than the manifesto they forced on Labour at the last election -- but no doubt they'll continue to avoid that kind of self-analysis and just carry on whining about Corbyn not being on course to win all 650 seats at the next election, or something.

She's not even the shortest-serving UKIP leader. http://cdn2.spectator.co.uk/files/2015/05/suzanne.png

They won't be as low as that, but it's fair to assume the rise in their support from this year's locals will be roughly proportionally the same. After all, virtually all the big trends in the 2015 general election were foreshadowed by the European elections a year earlier (HUGE swings to Labour in the big cities especially in London/Manchester/Liverpool, far smaller swings in most of the marginal small-town territory, a significant swing from the Lib Dems to the Tories in the marginal-heavy South West) - though the exception is that the big Scottish swing wasn't foreshadowed. Although I'm not sure whether grammar schools will help that much, they're not going to actively harm poor people in the same way as snatching away the very few crumbs that welfare claimants have. Not getting the chance to go to the best school in town is nowhere near as bad as not getting decent food on the table.

On topic, Theresa May is proving to be a vast improvement on Cameron/Osborne. I always found it baffling that Osborne was considered by the clueless pundits as "centre ground", when in terms of welfare he was far more cruel than Thatcher ever was. May seems atleast a bit more genuinely concerned about poorer people.

This is flatly contradicted by the local elections, where they were up compared to 2015 by considerably more in the marginals than nationally. In particular, on current polls, they'd probably fall quite a bit in some of the "traditional" Leave-voting seats (their poll ratings with "C2DE" voters are about the same or sometimes even worse than with middle-class voters), but with the opposition too split between the Tories and UKIP for them to actually lose many of the seats - thus making the Labour vote more "efficient". They physically *can't* climb much more in the inner cities since they already climbed so near to the ceiling in 2015 (how are they going to improve on 80% in Liverpool Walton or East Ham, for example?).

Did Corbyn actually ever try to remove Smith or Brown? Hell, I'm not even sure he ever was really involved in a serious plot to get rid of Blair (admittedly that might've been because there was no chance of a coup against him succeeding for most of his leadership). As far as I know, the only serious coup Corbyn was involved in was against Kinnock, and, although he was wrong to do it, that atleast was 5 years after Kinnock had been elected, after he'd been defeated in a general election, both of which are more reasonable grounds to think a mandate might have expired than the grounds for the coup against Corbyn.

But he hasn't lost the confidence of his colleagues (i.e. everyone in the party), as Saturday's result showed. As much as they have an overinflated sense of their importance, 232 MPs don't outweigh 600k members.

The methodology of most opinion polls has been changed significantly since the last general election. They now weight their results according to the exact turnout of each demographic group in 2015 - which is probably a mistake, because, as the EU Referendum showed, you can't be sure that groups that didn't turn out previously, won't turn out in future if there's more of an appeal made to them. And indeed, on the basis of this year's local election results, it does seem that young people are more enthused by Corbyn than they were by Miliband (based on Labour doing especially well in places with high numbers of "millennials", including in southern marginals like Milton Keynes and Reading), and so are now turning out in higher proportions than they did - which means the new poll methodology might be understating Labour by assuming young people will still be at the piss-poor turnout they were in 2015. For what it's worth, some pollsters still publish their "un-adjusted" polling figures (i.e. pre-2015 methodology), which always show better Labour results. That's before even getting into that current polls are taking in Theresa May's honeymoon effect (which literally EVERY new mid-term PM - Callaghan, Brown, Major - has benefitted from, before it fades away).

But they are, though. It was the first set of local elections that both leaders fought, both a year on from a general election, which is what makes them comparable. And Rallings & Thrasher (the people whose whole job for the past 40 YEARS is to work this stuff out) calculated that, extrapolating the results out over the whole of the UK, Corbyn narrowly beat the Tories, whereas Miliband narrowly lost to the Tories in his first elections. Admittedly they were significantly worse this year in Scotland than in 2011, but elsewhere it was an improvement.

But in the only set of proper elections we've had so far, Corbyn did better than Miliband's first round of elections (and if the last few years should've taught anything, it's that real elections are much more reliable than polls).

How about because it was disrespectful to the members who they're supposed to represent? Whether or not him staying as leader is best for the party, the fact is that it's not the MPs' call to make. They breached the unwritten rules of any modern (democratic) political party by trying to overrule their members' choice of leader.

Quite. I honestly don't think people really care about how "divided" parties are; much as it's forgotten now, Labour were always (publicly at least) "united" in the 2010-15 parliament, whereas the Tories were always having splits on policy and chatter about Cameron being overthrown, yet when it came to the election none of that made a shred of difference.

But a decent chunk of that 38% were former Scottish independence voters.