Qassändra

I reckon if anything the salutary lesson of Hillary Clinton is that the first female president will almost certainly not be someone who could be said to have got there through family ties.

Treason through aiding and abetting hacking and conspiring with a foreign power during an election is "nothing really"? Put it this way - if Jeremy Corbyn won a general election through foreign assistance from the EU which went to every effort to sabotage his opponents, and he was alleged to have been in communication with them and to have encouraged them to continue with it at every stage, would you claim that to be "nothing really"? If he then after winning said it was wrong and announced an inquiry into it, rather than resigning immediately and calling fresh elections on the basis that the prior result was irrevocably tainted, would you consider that a satisfactory response?

The peeing isn't the scandal, it's the treason allegations involving his campaign backchanneling with Wikileaks and the Russian government.

POOR ROGER PONTARE!

:D

KAPOW

Let's see how well these do given I've spent the last two years being wrong about pretty much everything. - French elections: Montebourg narrowly wins the Socialist Party nomination over Valls. Bayrou refuses to pull out and Emmanuel Macron's campaign implodes bigly, in part down to his 'apps will solve everything!'-esque vacuity. Despite Francois Fillon doing everything he can to antagonise the left, he holds on to enough elderly social conservatives that were dabbling with Front National to beat Le Pen in the run-off. - German elections: Merkel stays in despite losing seats and forms another grand coalition with the SPD, who see seat losses despite the hyped return of Martin Schulz - though in part due to the re-entry into Parliament of the FDP and the entry of AfD, which causes sharp falls in top-up list seats for the major parties. - Brexit negotiations become an ongoing car-crash in the wake of constant provocation of negotiators by Boris Johnson, David Davis and Liam Fox. Theresa May's plan (and best hand) to preserve single market access for sectors such as financial services by paying more into the EU budget is received with unbridled fury by morons who seem to think it deeply unreasonable that the UK can't have its cake and eat it. The wider public begins to shuffle nervously on its feet as inflation shoots up thanks to sterling tanking. Theresa May ends the year sorely regretting not calling that snap election as Ukip are revived by the return of hardcore Brexiteers. Newspapers begin to talk up the prospect of unilaterally exiting on the harshest WTO terms in 2018, for pride reasons or something. - Labour continue to be completely fucking irrelevant and spend the year continuing to be caught between two stools and choosing to satisfy neither side. Corbyn voters begin to shift uneasily on their feet as Corbyn's complete inability to set the agenda becomes ever more transparent, particularly after the Conservatives gain Copeland in February. Chastened by the last leadership election backbench rebels hold fire, but grassroots murmurs shift to talking about when Corbyn will go, not if. Keir Starmer, Emily Thornberry and Clive Lewis spend all year in a tense rivalry to be seen as the natural successor: Keir Starmer through keeping his head down and performing well in the Brexit brief, and Thornberry and Lewis through attempting to establish themselves as the Corbynism with competence candidate (but without Owen Smith's betrayal). Keep an eye out for how all three place themselves on the immigration dividing line. - Len McCluskey is re-elected general secretary of Unite. - The Lib Dems make it to the heady heights of the mid-teens in the polls again and win another by-election. The polls at the end of 2017: CON 34, LAB 21, UKIP 18, LD 17, SNP 4, GRN 4 - Keith Ellison is elected as DNC chair as the Democrats decide to accept the Sanders agenda wholesale for 2020. An attempt to impeach Trump is made early on on the basis of his business conflicts of interest. Despite being entirely legally justified, it falls in the House as Republicans spit blood at an "attempted subversion of democracy", with Breitbart christening it the 'cuck coup'. - Media outlets that criticise the Trump administration are denied White House press access, leading to a chilling effect on political reporting and an awakening of a resistance-mentality approach to reporting among a few select outlets that refuse to be cowed. Teen Vogue becomes the unlikely must-read magazine of the liberal elites. - Riots occur across major US cities after Trump's full throated support of the police when a police officer is caught on camera beating and killing a black man in custody. An assassination attempt or terrorist attack leads to Trump declaring a state of emergency. - Vladimir Putin invades a Baltic NATO nation specifically to provoke the fallout from Trump's likely refusal to abide by the invocation of Article 5, putting the existence of NATO in chaos. This unprecedented break in US foreign policy leads to John McCain and Lindsey Graham defecting to the Libertarian Party, and not much else.

Okay, sub 'physical voter intimidation' for fraud. Same difference.

You're not going to enjoy seeing what real election fraud looks like come 2020.

I think you misunderstand what I mean when I say that when a victory is narrow (77,750 votes across Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, out of 14 million votes) 'everything and nothing' is the reason. When it's that narrow, the deciding factor could equally be said to be however many were pissed off about the Iraq War, pissed off about gay marriage, pissed off about trans toilets, pissed off about Bill Clinton's rape allegations, pissed off about a woman being president. All a topic needs is to have been the deciding factor for 0.6% of the voters in those states to have a claim to be 'the deciding factor' that switched it from Hillary to Trump. That's what I mean when I say 'everything and nothing' is the reason Trump won. Which makes your insistence that Bernie Sanders would've beaten him even more odd.

Anyway, if you'd care to put down a series of predictions for 2017 please Michael. While you're on a roll.

...how has that got anything to do with gay marriage not being the reason Trump won?

So popular that he finished three million votes behind her. You can't predict a counterfactual. A popular Democratic Jewish economic populist - Russ Feingold - lost the Wisconsin senate race by more than Hillary Clinton lost the race. The state polls showed Hillary Clinton on track to win in the weeks leading up to the election. Why do you therefore think that a poll from *ten months* before the election showing Bernie Sanders would win is gospel, particularly when you still don't have an answer on how Bernie would've sold a 10% tax rise to a nation where two thirds think they're already taxed too much?

Narrow win for Sadiq and second on seats (and no constituency seats) in Scotland aside, I'll take that. Life is too short to go back and check if this happened, but even if it did the record for most vacuous and stupid thing said by a candidate for Leader of the Opposition was set in August this year when Owen Smith suggested getting round the table with ISIS in a laughable attempt to outflank Corbyn from the left that even he smacked down. The investigation is taking longer than I expected for Natalie McGarry but the likelihood of a good excuse for £30,000 going missing out of a campaign account she had sole access to seems low. I can't see the SNP losing the seat when it comes up. I should really have stuck to my prior prediction in 2014 that the SNP would lose their majority thanks to the Additional Member System producing unexpected results - despite their votes being pretty much on par with 2011, the SNP lost 12 seats on the list as a result of clearing up most of the constituency seats available. Mostly correct - she wasn't unopposed, but given she won (on a jobshare with Jonathan Bartley) with 86%, she may as well have been. Cute that I thought Ted Cruz would be the one with the rabid fanbase, I guess. Pass the Valium. This looks nearly correct, but I think this would be wrong even if we'd voted Remain - the Conservatives would've been too split and Ukip would be doing better.

Right, but a little wrong on the pre-referendum detail. The Leave campaign were far more willing to kick lumps out of Cameron than he was expecting after he forbade attacks on other Tories by the Remain side. However, given Euroscepticism has been the default position The one incorrect prediction here from which most of the other incorrect ones flow. Remain put their best foot forward and then shot themselves in it: leaving the EU would be a leap in the dark! That will cost you precisely £4,300 a year. If swing voters are suspicious of your best argument...well. I also didn't really take into account that the traditional 'jobs and economy jobs and economy you can't trust the other lot with the jobs and economy' argument that the Conservatives tend to romp home with every time doesn't work too well when the media isn't onside. Which, ironically, I probably should've known already from 1997. I imagine the LBC show is only a matter of time when he doesn't end up Ambassador. HAHAHAHA savage Theresa May definitely won't take up the offer either, given she's more often than not coming out of PMQs the loser these days. Not that she's particularly scared of Corbyn either way.

But for the wrong reason. I don't think you'd find many people who'd argue Donald Trump's win had much to do with Catholics defecting over gay marriage. Although I suppose the beauty of a win that narrow is that both everything and nothing is the precise reason Trump won.

Me leaving the party had barely a thing to do with Corbyn's economic arguments, as would be plain to anyone who read my reasons for leaving.

Yes, being leader of the opposition involves slightly more than going on the Sundays. It's a running joke among journalists that the Labour Party leadership has barely anything to say most days of the week. There was actual shock that they had a press release out within an hour of Paul Nuttall's election as Ukip leader, because it was the first time in months the leader's office had shown basic levels of press competence in months.

I'd say it's probably more likely the Conservatives will win. Labour are shedding votes to both the Lib Dems and Ukip. The Conservatives just need to stand still - all it would take would be Labour losing 3% to both the Lib Dems and Ukip each for the Tories to take the seat.

So why does he not say it? He's done fuck all media or public statements in the last few months. He makes Ed Miliband look dynamic. Anyway, I hope you're not kidding yourself that it's connecting in any way whatsoever with the public.

They don't really attack him anymore though. They just don't talk about him, as he rarely has anything to say.

I wouldn't be so sure of that. Someone has to be the opposition. Once an independent Scotland has to pay its own bills, it'll restore what's typically one of the main drivers for economic conservatism in a country that hasn't had that driver for quite a long time.

It's only recently become a thing again.

Two of Cumbria's six seats are *already* Conservative. They're 800 votes off taking Barrow and 2,500 off taking Copeland. And that was for a Prime Minister much less popular than Theresa May is, as things stand. Labour could keep Copeland, but there's no chance in hell a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party will hold Barrow.

People in Richmond Park weren't voting Lib Dem for Tim Farron. Unless by that you were referring to him having a local machine. In that respect - rebuilding the party through their traditional by-election wins - he's actually a pretty good leader for the Lib Dems to have. He turned a safe Tory seat into a safe Lib Dem seat (he was one of the few successes of the Lib Dems' 2005 decapitation strategy, which aimed to take out Tory Shadow Cabinet members) to the extent that he's pretty much the only Lib Dem with a majority to write home about. If he can get that campaign infrastructure camped out in Copeland for the next three months they could make a real dent in the Remain vote there. After all, as it stands there isn't *really* a good reason to vote Ukip, and there won't be unless Theresa May looks like she's on the verge of backsliding on Brexit or abandoning ending free movement as a red line. Conversely, given Brexit dominates at the moment, if stopping Brexit or making it as soft as possible is your number one issue, the Lib Dems are a far more obvious choice in that respect than Labour are. Labour will be hoping voters aren't deciding on the basis of the EU for this by-election, because changing the subject is the only way they can really make themselves the answer as things stand. Annoyingly for Labour, nuclear (obviously huge in Copeland because of Sellafield) isn't a way they can do that - the Lib Dems reversed their opposition to nuclear power in 2013. And Trident...is probably something the Labour leadership would prefer to avoid discussing.