Qassändra

Depends whether or not he's going to push the inheritance tax thing. If not, yep. If he does...

What will you be changing your name to if this doesn't happen? I'll even let you choose.

Truly the worst of all positions.

Much less applicable though, given they get a say in the EU whereas they absolutely didn't in the Soviet Union. Short of maybe Wings, Craig Murray and the most devoted of Cybernats, I'm not sure how many Nats would go so far as to suggest Scotland's under some Sovietesque thumb.

You'd think, but somehow that hasn't stopped support for independence staying exactly where it was 18 months ago, if not a little higher.

He did it last night. The only thing of note was him getting £200k from his mum and inheriting £300k from his dad, which has got John McDonnell saying the system is wrong if he didn't pay inheritance tax on it. Mild fear that we may somehow end up with the biggest scandal for the Prime Minister somehow still ending up a negative for Labour if he's going to choose to die on that hill.

I think support for independence might increase if we leave the EU though. Which would be deeply ironic in some ways, but fairly understandable.

You're citing someone who thinks cherrypicking from national crosstabs of polls (which have small sample sizes and therefore ludicrously huge margins of error) is kosher.

Speaking of hard and accurate maths, the delegate gain for Bernie in Wyoming tonight over Hillary was a grand total of 0 - he didn't win by enough to break the tie. Mmmm, momentum. In what sense is it likely that a group of people who generally dislike Bernie (remember, these are Democratic insiders who don't really take kindly to a man who has refused to identify as a Democrat all his adult life and who is doing nothing to raise funds and support Democratic candidates - a pretty key difference with all previous primaries where the superdelegates have supported the winner) and typically have a huge amount of loyalty to the Clintons will jump to supporting him even if he hasn't overtaken Hillary on votes? I would also add that everything from before is still true - he's really unlikely to overtake her on pledged delegates even if he wins '88% of the states' (which is very unlikely given how many have high proportions of African American voters and how many she has big leads in), because the delegates are done proportionally.

What achievements of the radical left, exactly? If we're going to dismiss social democracy, I want some receipts on those. And I don't mean 'winning internal elections'. Also, a reminder that the Attlee government was considered a social democratic sellout by the left at the time too. My dislike of radical left candidates if anything is a function of my hatred and fear of right wing candidates. Society is biased to the latter even at the best of times, let alone without us opening the door for them.

And they will argue that the will of the people will be the candidate who got more votes, as Hillary almost certainly will have done if she gets enough pledged delegates to win with superdelegates.

That whole article is based on the ridiculous assumption that superdelegates will suddenly decide to unendorse someone who has enough delegates to be the nominee (and almost certainly more votes). What exactly do you think the point of superdelegates are?

How weird, I didn't realise only 40% of Democrats knew him.

Mmm, yes, forward motion. Those polls since February 1st by the way: http://i.imgur.com/yj4FQy7.png Frankly feeling run over with the sheer momentum there.

Define 'momentum' please Michael.

Is it the majority of newspapers? I count Express, Mail and The Sun for Out, against The Times, The Guardian, The Mirror and the I for In, with the Telegraph probably going for Out in the end. The unspoken bias of the BBC and Channel 4 will be for In.

Literally not true.

Nup. Exit polls of Perot voters found he pretty much drew from both Clinton and Bush equally.

And now Cameron's gone to saying he did have shares in the firm, which was all but admitted anyway when they did the statement the other day saying the family wouldn't benefit from offshore shares 'in future'. The thing I don't understand at all is why he didn't just say that on day one rather than making it look like he had something to hide with five carefully worded statements over several days and dragging it all out. Catastrophically dreadful PR management on a par with MILNE!

Fivethirtyeight, how could you feed me the outlier! *sends hate mail to nate*

Well that's the thing - I imagine Republican-leaners would be more inclined to those opinions than genuine swing independents. I'd still be interested to see how liar, fake and crook lined up against racist, mad and sexist (there's no chance the result would be on such a crushing level, but I could see something similar to Chirac vs Le Pen's 'I'm voting for the crook, not the fascist' memes, albeit not quite as extreme in either case)

I wouldn't say they've been hounding Hillary much over the last month or two ever since Benghazi retreated, if only because there hasn't been much to say. From what I can see they've been playing up how much of a chance Bernie has when they have covered the Democratic race, but I think that's more down to just horse race reporting in general. I just think that Hillary's negatives are pretty low-level constant ones where non-aligned voters that dislike her don't *like* her, as opposed to outright loathing her (in that regard I think she's quite similar to Cameron), which I think is a better place than its given credit for when up against someone as bombastic and divisive as Trump or Cruz. I don't think your analogy fits too well. Bill Clinton had the downside of not being especially well known to the American public, at least much less so than Trump or Cruz are, so what he was known for was a mixture of constant infidelity allegations along with maybe his message (which only really properly came through at the convention, giving him a massive jump). As you say, I think both sides are likely to hold their noses out of loathing for the other, but I think far fewer Republican voters will unite behind Trump compared to Democrats uniting behind Hillary. After all, it doesn't get mentioned all that much but Hillary's really well liked among Democratic voters (you don't get to constant 45 percent approval ratings from nowhere) and has very few Democrats saying they wouldn't be able to vote for her, compared with Trump who's getting about 30 to 40 percent of Republican female voters outright saying they don't think they could vote for him. Bill Clinton had a fairly bruising nomination, but infidelity was far easier to get past in uniting the party than I think outright racism and misogyny will be. Cruz would probably be able to unite self-identified Republican voters, but that's without getting onto Trump almost certainly going third party (out of spite, if nothing else) and how much independents will loathe him/Democrats will be motivated against him.

Nup. Cruz is doing worse than Hillary too. And it's still a fair gap given Hillary's mid-40s approving vs low-50s disapproving (essentially where Obama's approval ratings have been for a good chunk of his presidency), whereas Trump's at low-30s approving, high-50s to mid-60s disapproving. Probably on a par with where Goldwater would've been. When it comes down to it, I think she's H.W. to Obama's Reagan. That's at least a big consolidation for the Democrats though I think, and unlike the Democrats in '88 there isn't even the faintest hint that the Republicans are going to get their act together in time for 2020.

Since when did anti-establishment candidates ever win general elections in developed countries? (Even in multi-party systems where you'd expect it to be easier the best most manage is second. Iceland's probably about to make its mark as the first where one actually gets a plurality.)

Get to fuck. Annoyed I forgot to vote in this but guessing my vote likely wouldn't have changed anything.