Danny

Meanwhile, the supposed "shoo-in" Clinton is now slightly behind Trump in the polling average: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/20...inton-5491.html Various polls of swing states in the past week have also confirmed that the election is too close to call.

Goodness me, the Czech woman made the most painful note I've ever heard in my life, towards the end of that.

Amusingly enough, the South was actually Labour's strongest region (in terms of swing from 2011, the like-for-like comparative point) on Thursday.

Sorry, but you're completely changing your tune from the endless debates we had during the Miliband years. You yourself said at the time that Miliband was putting forward "centre-ground" policies, but that it was the only way to win the election. In the event, not only were they the wrong policies in principle, they didn't even win the election. Ed Miliband occasionally saying "inequality is bad" is not enough to make him left-wing, when he was putting forward austerity policies that would've made inequality worse. Again, I don't agree. Yvette Cooper was duller than Miliband, and Kendall would've come across as even more of an incompetent lightweight who'd be dominated by the Salmonds and Sturgeons of the world. Remember the Newsnight focus groups of swing voters saying Liz would be a worse leader than Corbyn?

Obviously I don't agree with that. Burnham was maybe a bit better than Miliband (though in hindsight I think I had wishful thinking towards him), the other two were worse. The bottom line is the other 3 would've all offered a continuation of the previous 5 years (Blairite policies without a superstar-level leader like Blair to compensate). There is no reason to think it would've panned out any differently. Not only would they not have come close to the influence on government policy that Corbyn has achieved, they also would've done slightly worse electorally than Corbyn to boot. So what exactly is the incentive to go back to the previous way? Yes, quite - the government does 5-6 points better than the average of their local elections performance over the whole of the term. But history also shows that the first-year performance is by far a government's best performance over a term, and that the average will be lower than 32% by the time we get to the general election.

Equally, the Conservatives got a one-point increase over their general election performance in 2011, whereas they've had a 6-point drop this time. Whichever way it's looked at, the most crucial stat is Labour and the Tories' positions relative to each other - and on that score, Corbyn is so far proving slightly more of a success than Miliband.

Meanwhile, Rallings & Thrasher have confirmed national vote shares for the locals Labour 33% Conservatives 32% Lib Dems 14% UKIP 12% Confirming that Corbyn has slightly outperformed Miliband, relative to the Conservatives, on their respective first outings in local elections. The 32% for the Tories is the third-worst performance for a government in the first locals of a cycle since 1979, ahead of only the Tories in 1993 (31%) and Labour in 2006 (26%). Also considerably down on the 38% they got in 2011. First-year performances for governments 1980 Conservatives 40% (2% behind Labour) 1984 Conservatives 38% (1% ahead of Labour) 1988 Conservatives 39% (1% ahead of Labour 1993 Conservatives 31% (8% behind Labour) 1998 Labour 37% (4% ahead of Conservatives) 2002 Labour 33% (1% behind Conservatives) 2006 Labour 26% (13% behind Conservatives) 2011 Conservatives 38% (1% ahead of Labour) 2016 Conservatives 32% (1% behind Labour)

Personally, I don't think the Tories' troubles over the last few weeks have been anything particularly out of the ordinary. Governments are always having bust-ups about something, they are always making gaffes, voters always find something to be discontented about. It will most likely continue right through this parliament -- with the kicker being that voters will take a progressively less forgiving view of the government's setbacks the more that the last general election recedes into the memory, as always happens. Remember that in the run-up to the 2011 locals, the cuts were kicking in, the economy was in terrible shape, the phone-hacking scandal was getting underway with Andy Coulson already being forced to resign, there'd been a big furore about bankers awarding themselves pre-2008 levels of bonuses, and the government were in-fighting over the AV referendum (a minister accusing someone of "Goebbels-like propaganda" is easily more strong than anything we've seen in the EU referendum so far). Yet in spite of all that, the Tories still won the voteshare that year, and Labour did worse (relatively speaking) that year than they've done in 2016.

I don't know why you and other people keep saying this. A party is not going to be "at the depths of its popularity" just a year on from winning a general election. Again, if you want stats, then ALL history suggests it's going to get a hell of a lot worse for the Tories from here, because that is ALWAYS what happens after a government's honeymoon period ends.

Yes, but so would Labour last week if the electoral cycle had been aligned, like it was in IDS's day! History suggests that a 1% lead for the Opposition in the first batch of local elections usually translates into a roughly 5% lead for the sitting government at the next General Election -- i.e. almost certainly a hung parliament in 2020. Not great obviously, but not the Tory landslide the clueless Establishment are taking for granted, and no worse than any of the other leadership candidates last year would've got.

But you were talking about Kinnock, Hague, IDS and Howard -- all 4 of them fought on a 4-year electoral cycle, so you can't say "Corbyn's doing worse than them" when the metric for Corbyn is completely different. Hague and Kinnock (in both 1984 and 1988) lost slightly on voteshare to the Tories on their first outing, so Corbyn has done better than them. He's done as well/badly as IDS did in 2002. John Smith was still Labour leader in 1994, when the Tories did a fair bit worse than a year earlier, simply because mid-term attrition always kicks in after two years even with all other things being equal.

Again, they gained seats only when the local elections cycle and general election cycle were aligned (when general elections were held every 4 years like local elections). So the phenomenon of governments doing better in the first year of local elections, before deteriorating as they got into mid-term proper, was already baked into the comparisons since it would always be comparing the first year of a General Election cyle to the first year of the next cycle, the second year of one cycle to the second year of the next, etc. But now that general elections are held every 5 years, gains/losses are not a reliable guide. Had Thursday's local elections been on the same seats as 2011 (i.e. aligned electoral cycles like Kinnock, Hague, IDS and Howard all fought in), Labour WOULD have made a modest number of gains, since their national voteshare position was better vs 2011.

Meanwhile, Cheshire amusingly continues to turn red. Labour gained the PCC there, to follow up from West Cheshire being their only council gain anywhere in the UK In the 2015 local elections.

OK-ish in relative terms, compared to what happened in the years after though, surely? They lost the estimated vote share in 1993 to Labour by "only" 8% -- compared to losing by 12% in 1994 when John Smith was still leader, 22%(!!) in 1995 in Blair's first set of elections, and 13% in 1996. It wasn't just the 1992-97 cycle either, it's been common for the last 30 years for the first set of local elections to be the best batch of a cycle for the government. The Tories won the estimated vote in both 1984 and 1988, Labour won quite comfortably in 1998, and then the Tories won in 2011.

No - they were both measuring the same thing, projected voteshares for the whole of the UK - it's just the 2% Labour lead in 2011 was an earlier estimate, which was later revised to a 1% Tory lead. If the current 1% Labour lead stands, that makes it unequivocal fact that Labour are tracking ahead of their performance at this point in the last parliament. But comparing 2012 to 2016 really is comparing apples with oranges -- governments literally always, ALWAYS, do better in the first set of local elections in an electoral cycle than they do later on. There is ALWAYS somewhat of a lingering honeymoon effect just one year out from a general election, no matter how badly they're messing up (even in 1993, in the immediate wake of Black Wednesday, the Tories did OK-ish in the locals). 2011 is the only like-for-like comparison point for this set of elections Which is not to say Corbyn is on course to win the next general election -- after all, marginally tracking ahead of Ed Miliband is nothing to write home about. But it's still a more appealing prospect than returning to the Blairite "centre ground" course of letting the Tories pass all the cuts they want without a fight and letting them shift the terms of debate endlessly to the right, without even any more chance of election success than Corbyn offers to compensate.

Actually, the BBC projects on results so far Labour have won the estimated national vote by about 1-2% -- that would be better than Ed Miliband's first outing in 2011, where he lost to the Tories by 1%. In any case, most of the losses Labour have suffered were to UKIP, which suggests it's the EU referendum that is causing Labour trouble more than anything else -- yet that is the very issue where the Blairites want to take a kamikaze "no compromise with the electorate" approach.

So with Labour largely holding its ground (outside of Scotland anyway), "unelectable" Corbyn has proven to be just as much (or as little) electable as the "centre-ground" numpties who ran the show for the previous five years

Even if he was offered it, would Sanders want to take a VP slot? With that said, I'm not sure who the VP slot will go to. The most common pick a while back was Julian Castro, but I'm not sure he'd be very good at helping the ticket appeal to either the leftwing "Bernie Bros" or to the white working-class men who are Clinton's big weakness and Trump's big strength.

Meanwhile, Trump now looks to have a real chance of clinching the 1237 delegates he needs to get the nomination outright.

To be fair, it's an open secret that she was being hounded out of her job by Jim Murphy and his acolytes, who (as usual with that faction of the party) were only thinking about their own personal positions rather than points of principle. I always thought she was rather good at calling out Alex Salmond on his bullshit.

I'm in awe of how Scottish Labour seem determined to plumb new depths with each of their leaders. Whenever I've seen the latest one get interviewed, she seems to have come straight from the Liz Kendall mould of "out of depth primary-school teacher unable to control the class". Nicola Sturgeon and Ruth Davidson atleast seem to have some self-belief and a bit of gravitas, whatever you think of their policies. Personally I think SLAB would be better off going back to Johann Lamont.

I still think New York is going to be much closer than some of these polls are showing. The polls in northern states have tended to underestimate Sanders.

I really don't agree with that. All the various focus groups have said Republican-leaners hate her more even than Obama. The most common words people use about her are not vaguely negative low-level ones like "boring" which I would agree would be manageable -- they're really vitriolic words like "liar", "fake" and "crook". I would say she is less Cameron and more Gordon Brown, who people loathed with a passion even if they grudgingly respected his competence. She doesn't consistently get 45% approval btw - that's her *best* but her current average is 40.4% (with a net of -15%), considerably worse than Obama's at anytime in his presidency: http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollst...avorable-rating

But she might well be George H.W. Bush in 1992 rather than in 1988 -- at this point in the '92 election, he was miles ahead of Bill Clinton in the polls, because the Democrat nomination battle had been so bruising and so much muck had been thrown at Clinton that a lot of Democrat voters supporting other candidates were answering "don't know" in the Bush v Clinton polls. But as soon as the nomination battle was over, all the Democrats who had previously been reluctant started holding their noses and saying Clinton was the lesser of two evils, while people were reminded of Bush's negatives too. I would argue both are entirely possible this time too if/when Trump finally clinches the nomination (I know you think Hillary has been getting hounded by the media, but, the left-wing blogosphere aside, it's my impression that the major US media has been pretty much ignoring Hillary/the Democrat battle for the past month or so, so it's not surprising her standing in polls vs Trump has risen when people aren't being reminded why they dislike her on a daily basis). That's without even considering the distinct possibility in the next 6 months of an economic shock or a terrorist attack on American soil which might make a lot of swing voters think "Trump is a douche, but he has a point about things needing a shake-up".

This thing about Trump having "the worst approval ratings for any presidential candidate on record" might be a bit more powerful if Clinton didn't have the second-worst ratings on record.