Tempted to bet on a race for London's mayor

London's mayoral election has me interested. I can't help thinking that the defeat of Labour's Ken Livingstone back in 2008 by the Conservative candidate Boris Johnson owed a great deal to the unpopularity of the British Labour Government. With Tony Blair and George Brown now consigned to the lucrative public speaking sidelines and Prime Minister David Cameron suffering from dismal economic prospects I would expect things to be different this time.

I admit that so far there is no evidence from the opinion polls that there will be a Livingstone revival. Johnson had a winning margin of nearly six percentage points and the latest polls back in November had him doing slightly better than that. But I did find this piece from The Guardian suggesting that my hunch might prove correct and that Livingstone's price of $3.85 on Betfair is over the odds.

Ken Livingstone has a vision for a capitalist metropolis. And Boris? | Politics | guardian.co.uk:

"It's still early days, of course, and official campaigning has yet to begin. Yet any clear sense of what a second Boris Johnson mayoral term would seek to achieve remains striking by its absence. Ken Livingstone's camp might claim that this reflects the success of its Fare Deal campaign in putting the Boris operation on the back foot, but the dearth of all but the faintest outlines of policy proposals for four more years of Tory mayoralty, let alone a driving central theme, raises once again the question of what Mayor Johnson is actually for."

No investment from me as yet but I am watching closely for further evidence.

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Time Is Running Out To Knock Romney Down

I hope they are right!

 It's All Politics : NPR:

"Once more, the great media consensus was confounded. Saturday night's debate at St. Anselm's College in Manchester, N.H., produced another battle among half a dozen presidential contenders, much like a dozen before it. Front-runner Mitt Romney was neither knocked out nor even knocked down. He was scarcely even knocked around.

Once again, the evening ended with the bruises pretty equally distributed among the contestants. And with the New Hampshire primary bearing down on Tuesday, virtually no time remains for Romney's rivals to bring him down."

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Betting Romney keeps rolling onwards

I'm keeping on the Mitt Romney bandwagon as the evidence mounts that the Newt Gingrich bubble has well and truly burst and the rather extremist religious views of Rick Santorum begin getting exposed.
Intrade had him as a 70% chance and I took the little that was available ($35 worth).
Then had a modest $41 investment on Romney to win in Florida at 82%.

National GOP Leader Post-New Hampshire Is Good Bet to Win

From Gallup:

National GOP Leader Post-New Hampshire Is Good Bet to Win: " In recent Republican presidential nomination campaigns, the results of the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary have often made Republicans nationwide re-evaluate their preferences for the nominee, with the most change occurring in 1980 and 2008. Since 1976 -- the first year in the modern nominating era in which there was a competitive Republican contest -- the leader after New Hampshire has ultimately won the nomination."

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Santorum: States Should Have The Right To Outlaw Birth Control | ThinkProgress

Surely with views like this the man could not really be any major party's selection!

Rick Santorum reiterated his belief that states should have the right to outlaw contraception during an interview with ABC News yesterday, saying, “The state has a right to do that, I have never questioned that the state has a right to do that. It is not a constitutional right, the state has the right to pass whatever statues they have.”

antorum has long opposed the Supreme Court’s 1965 ruling “that invalidated a Connecticut law banning contraception” and has also pledged to completely defund federal funding for contraception if elected president. As he told CaffeinatedThoughts.com editor Shane Vander Hart in October, “One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country,” the former Pennsylvania senator explained. “It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

rom - Santorum: States Should Have The Right To Outlaw Birth Control | ThinkProgress:

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US elections 2012: Mitt Romney braced for tough fight as Right prepares to unite behind Santorum - Telegraph

US elections 2012: Mitt Romney braced for tough fight as Right prepares to unite behind Santorum - Telegraph:

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Perhaps I will get a bit of value from my Santorum at $27!

Sticking with Mitt

For Crikey's The Stump blog I produce a series of election indicators based on the major prediction markets. As Iowa Republicans gather to give their verdict on Republican presidential candidates the  Indicator illustrates the uncertainty about the likely outcome. While Mitt Romney is favoured with a 43.1% probability,  Ron Paul and Rick Santorum are also rated as significant chances.
There's always a temptation to take a modest profit on the eve of an event but this time I'm letting my investment on Romney ride in the hope that he will finish first as Pau, Santorum and Gingrich divide the anti-Romney forces.