Us politics

Of course, Mitt Romney hasn’t secured the Republican nomination yet. But now that the bookies have him odds on at 1/9, it’s definitely worth thinking about how he’d shape up against Barack Obama. Does he have much of a chance? Well, yes, actually. The head-to-head polls so far point to a close fight between Obama and Romney. And Obama’s approval ratings and GDP growth forecasts — better predictors of the result at this stage — also point to a very tight election. It’s shaping up to be one of those elections where the key to victory is not the national popular vote, but the Electoral College. It’ll be winning each individual

Tonight’s New Hampshire primary is very unlikely to provide the sort of razor-thin margin we saw in Iowa last week. Mitt Romney looks assured of a comfortable win – Nate Silver’s poll-based model (above) gives him a 98 per cent chance of victory. If one of the others did somehow beat him, it’d be the biggest upset of any modern US primary. The only real questions are just how comfortable it’ll be (20 points? 30? or just 10?), and who will come second. The polls suggest the battle for runner-up will be between Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman. Paul is the favourite to take it, but the momentum of the

Mitt Romney’s status as the overwhelming favourite to be the Republican nominee for president is confirmed by a new poll out of South Carolina. It has Romney on 37 per cent, 18 points ahead of his nearest rival Rick Santorum. South Carolina is the next primary contest after New Hampshire, which takes place on Tuesday and which Romney is expected to win comfortably.   The significance of these new numbers is that South Carolina, the first primary in the south, has long been considered inhospitable territory for Romney. (In the 2008 primary there, he finished a disappointing fourth with 15 percent of the vote). If Romney is to be denied

The year has begun with Iran and the United States circling each other in the Straits of Hormuz; like two boxers before a bout, seeing who will strike first and working out where a blow could land. The immediate cause has been Iranian manoeuvres in the Arabian Gulf, and a visit to the area by the American aircraft carrier USS John C Stennis. Iran’s army chief has said that his country will take action if a US aircraft carrier returns to the Gulf. Oil prices have shot up as a result. This could be the worst time to goad a Democratic president facing pressure from those Republicans currently trying ‘out

An Israeli strike on Iran has to be the most over-predicted event of recent years. It was meant to happen last year. And the year before that. But now there are reasons why 2012 could, indeed, be the year when Israel will find it propitious to take overt military action against Iran’s nuclear programme. (Everyone assumes that a range of covert activities, from assassinations to cyber attacks, are already ongoing). The Iranian government is moving closer to having the requisite capabilities, and can reasonably be expected to take the final steps towards nuclearisation. What better way for Tehran to distract attention from their burgeoning problems — including sanctions, economic hardship,

The year is ending not with a successful US withdrawal from Iraq — as President Barack Obama claims — but with what amounts to a coup d’etat by the country’s Shiite prime minister (and former ally of the US) Nouri al-Maliki. Less than 24 hours after the last US soldier left Iraq, the country’s Sunni vice-president Tareq al-Hashemi was wanted on charges that he led death squads, in a case most observers think could reignite the sectarian slaughter of 2006-07. Violence in Iraq has subsided since 2006-07, when Sunni insurgents and Shiite militiamen killed thousands of civilians each month — but, without U.S. troops to act as a buffer, many

Steven F. Hayward’s audit of the state of American conservatism, which David Brooks judges to be one of the best magazine articles of the year, argues that the Reaganite ‘starve the beast strategy’ has failed to halt the growth of government. Hayward writes: ‘Thirty years after the arrival of the Reagan Revolution, government is bigger than ever. The Reagan years appear to have been little more than a mild speed bump in the progress of ever-larger government. The regulatory state advances relentlessly on every front. The soaring national debt threatens economic oblivion sooner or later. In short, the Reagan era, for all that was accomplished, was not an analogue to