The Reverend is in want of a wife...sorry, CLOCK

So make that 27,544.  Yes, thrillingly, the "Reverend" nipped away from his MAGA celebration party for a few seconds today to post a response on Twitter to my blogpost of last night.

"I wondered how he'd handle Trump's win, and I wasn't disappointed. I'd quite like to see the half-hour head-shaking, though."

Campbell seems as pleased as punch with that riposte, so it's almost a shame to have to spoil it by pointing out the obvious logical problem, but I fear I must.  You see, if he had bothered checking the time-stamp on my blogpost, he'd know that I published it at 11.14pm last night, meaning I wrote it before any exit poll had been released or any results at all had come in.  In other words, nobody had a clue at that point who was going to be elected President (apart from Rory Stewart who knew it was going to be Kamala Harris), and my blogpost therefore had nothing whatever to do with how I "handled Trump's win", which didn't happen until several hours later.

It's fascinating, though, that Campbell so clearly imagines himself to be "gloating" about Trump's victory, because that removes any remaining sliver of doubt about one of the points I made last night.  Yes, Campbell would have voted for Trump if he was an American citizen, and yes, he was sitting there last night willing Trump to win, which is certainly not something the vast majority of the people of Scotland were doing.  What's more, his excuse for supporting Trump is something to do with "women's rights", which is curious, given that Trump's hand-picked vice-president believes that the sole function of women is to have children, and that their lives are worthless if they do not.

Give Campbell his due, though, he's on a bit of a roll in 2024.  He wanted pro-independence parties in Scotland to lose at the general election, and he got what he wanted, albeit narrowly.  (And that includes the Alba Party, of course - he told his readers to reject Alba and to vote for unionist parties instead.)  He wanted Trump to have another four years as US President, and now he's got that too.  I'm quite open that I see very little comfort in the results of either the general election or the US presidential election, but there is one small entertaining aspect to it - and that will be watching Campbell over the coming years having to own the consequences of getting the election results he wanted on both sides of the Atlantic.

Adjusting to the Trump restoration

For the reasons I set out in my blogpost last night before the results came in, it's no exaggeration to say that Donald Trump's return to the White House is a setback for humanity.  However, in these situations you have to cling to the positives, and this is what I've come up with - 

* American moral leadership of the 'free world' will at the very least be on pause for the next four years, meaning it will no longer be so easy for European governments to reflexively support whatever nasty stuff the US wants.  Think about the repugnant coordinated withdrawal of funds from UNRWA a few months ago to distract from the ICJ's ruling against Israel.  If the UK were to participate in a stunt like that again, Starmer would pay a heavy political price for doing Trump's bidding.

* The Democrats are not going to be rewarded for facilitating genocide.  OK, there's going to be a pro-genocide president anyway, so in a sense it makes no difference, but there would have been something almost despair-inducing about progressives having been successfully browbeaten into producing an election-winning majority on the basis of "shut up and understand why the mass killing of Palestinians is necessary", as per Bill Clinton's disgraceful speech.

* Although one of my biggest concerns is about the American nuclear arsenal being under the control of an unstable narcissist, there is a counter-argument, which is that Trump's win will probably bring the Ukraine war to an end as a stalemate, and confrontation with Russia will actually become less likely as a result.

* For us non-fans of NATO, it's hard to see how this is anything other than a setback for that alliance.  NATO will probably not break up but it could well go into a sort of deep freeze.

* The left in other countries will not be able to use Kamala Harris as a template, which would have been a thoroughly dismal prospect.

* Rory Stewart is the shame of "the Middleland" this morning.

A brief reply to Stuart Campbell's latest bizarre attack on me *for voting against Donald Trump*

While we wait for the early exit polls, I just thought I'd briefly address the 27,543rd unprovoked attack on me from my crazed Somerset-based stalker, because this time he's angry with me for voting against Donald Trump.  Seriously.

"You know what's so wretched about this? There's *not one word* about what Harris would do to the rights of women, LGB people and vulnerable children. Women simply *never even figured in his thought process for a moment*."

So Campbell told people to vote unionist at the general election, he openly admits he would abstain in any new independence referendum, and now it turns out he would have voted for Donald Trump if he was American. Did anyone ever doubt it?

If I was even going to try to form a serious response to Campbell's rant, I would start by shaking my head in total disbelief for at least half an hour.  What do you even say to the guy?  There is an apocalypse going on in Gaza and it is only happening because of US government support.  I have been racked with guilt for the last three weeks because I have cast a vote for a vice-president who is literally facilitating genocide in real time.  But I did it because I was trying to be responsible due to the future of the world being at stake on two counts: a) a Trump win would put the world's second-largest nuclear arsenal in the hands of an unstable narcissist, which could in the worst case scenario lead to the sudden end of human civilisation, and b) a Trump win would stall any action on the climate emergency for four years, which is time we simply don't have.

So, frankly, I make no apology for the fact that the three rather important issues that have been at the forefront of my thoughts as I made my decision were genocide, nuclear annihilation and the climate emergency.  Campbell, of course, believes I should instead have been thinking about the trans issue, because that's the only issue in the entire f****** universe he actually cares about.  (Not "women", incidentally, who he doesn't give a toss about - if he did he'd realise that most people who care about women's rights voted for Harris due to the overturning of Roe v Wade.)

Stuart, sod off, you small-minded, obsessed little man.  My gender critical views are on the record and well-known, but if you think that's going to lead me to flirt with soft fascism, you can just take a hike.

Who will win today's US presidential election?

The answer is, of course, that I don't have a scooby. If the statistical experts who devote their lives to studying this question say the race is as hard to read as a coin toss (and they do), nobody else has got much of a prayer. And I say that with all due respect to the blessed Rory Stewart, who is claiming certain knowledge that Kamala Harris will win by miles, probably because he thinks it will help his punditry career if he's guessed correctly, and that everyone will swiftly forget he ever made a prediction otherwise.  We won't, Rory.  The people of "the Middleland" never forget.

I do have a few observations, though.  The betting exchanges currently say Donald Trump has a 62% chance of winning the election, but that Kamala Harris has a 76% chance of winning the national popular vote.  They also say there is a 60% chance that whoever wins the popular vote will carry the electoral college.  That sounds like a contradiction, but isn't - the 24% chance that Trump will win the popular vote is an important component of his percentage chance of winning overall.

The national polls in this campaign have been strikingly similar to 2016 in the sense that Donald Trump has been a bit behind in most of them.  And yet in 2016 that translated into Hillary Clinton being the strong favourite on the betting exchanges, whereas this time punters are assuming that a small Harris lead in the popular vote will translate into a Trump win in the electoral college.  Could that be a case of learning the wrong lesson from history? Having been burnt before by the incorrect assumption that a Democrat popular vote win would translate into overall victory, they're assuming the same thing is bound to happen again, whereas in fact the relationship between the popular vote and electoral college numbers is much more unpredictable than that?

Well, maybe, although there has been a key change in US politics in recent years, which is that Florida has transitioned from being a toss-up state to being an almost solid Republican state.  That means more than 5% of electoral college votes, which were firmly in play for the Democrats in previous tight elections, have now been practically taken out of the game completely.  So it might not be unreasonable to assume at this stage that the electoral college is genuinely and reliably skewed in Trump's favour.  I had guessed the change in Florida was probably due to anti-communist or anti-Maduro immigrants from Cuba and Venezuela, but apparently it's more to do with anti-lockdown Republicans moving to Florida over the course of the pandemic.

Punters also have state polls with which to judge the interplay between the national popular vote and electoral college outcome, although that brings us to the issue of poll 'herding', ie. poll companies deliberately tweaking their methodology to ensure their results are similar to their competitors, to reduce risk and ensure they all stand or fall together.  That leaves open the possibility that if the polls are wrong, they could all be wrong by quite some distance.  One theory is that the overturning of Roe v Wade is motivating liberal women to vote in record numbers, and that the polls aren't picking that up.  But so far that's no more than an untested theory.

During election night in 2016 (and something very similar happened in our own EU referendum six months earlier) there was an extraordinary window of opportunity of an hour or two to make a killing on the betting exchanges, because it was obvious from the actual results that Trump was the likely winner, but there was a lag on the exchanges with Clinton remaining favourite, probably due to an ingrained belief that a Trump win was unthinkable.  Could the same thing happen tonight if Harris wins?  I doubt it, actually.  Harris may be the underdog, but nobody thinks a win for her is unthinkable, so if the early results for her are favourable, I would expect the markets to adjust very quickly.  But you never know - it's always worth just checking.

Why I voted for Kamala Harris - and why that decision makes me feel dirty

A few weeks ago, I asked Scot Goes Pop readers for advice about my dilemma over whether to vote for Kamala Harris or Jill Stein.  I think you could see from the reactions that the 'right' and 'wrong' answers in this case are very much in the eye of the beholder, because some people thought it was incomprehensible that I could even consider voting for Harris while she is in the middle of facilitating a genocide, but there were other people who found it equally incomprehensible that I could even consider not voting for Harris given that she is the only person who can stop Donald Trump.

In the end I voted for Harris, and I did the deed weeks ago, so I've had plenty of time to mull it over, and it does make me feel dirty.  I'm pretty sure the me of fifteen years ago would have taken the opposite decision, and the me of fifteen years ago might well have been right.  If I'd heard Bill Clinton's astounding pro-genocide speech before rather than after I voted, that might possibly have changed my decision, I don't know.  But for what it's worth, my reasoning was as follows -

* I just couldn't see what a vote for Stein was actually going to achieve.  If she had a realistic chance of getting to 5% of the vote, that would have swayed me, because it would have unlocked federal funding for the Greens.  Even a realistic chance of getting to 3% would have interested me, because that might have started a serious conversation among Democrats about the policy changes required to win that substantial bloc of votes back.  But at 1% or less of the vote for Stein, even if that's enough to swing the election in Trump's favour, the Democrats will stay in their comfort zone and the only lesson they'll learn is that they need to lecture voters even more about not wasting their votes.

* It's quite true that the first-past-the-post voting system forces you to choose at times between a glorified abstention and casting what is effectively a fifth-preference vote to prevent your sixth preference from winning. In a sensible America with a preferential voting system, I wouldn't have felt remotely conflicted about giving Harris a fifth preference vote to make sure I ranked her above Trump, and arguably the principle of voting for her tactically under FPTP is much the same.

* Harris is only one of two people on the Democratic ticket, and I gather Tim Walz is regarded as having had a left-ish record as governor of Minnesota (although he's no better than Harris on the genocide issue).  So that at least sprinkles a little glitter on the Democratic option.

The bottom line is that I always knew I would regret my decision regardless of which way I jumped, because there was no good option available.  I'm certainly not going to be willing Harris to win tomorrow night, but at least it won't be on my conscience if she doesn't.

If it wasn't for the fact that Trump is certain to be irresponsible on climate change, and is not the sort of person you'd ever want to put in total control of the world's second-largest nuclear arsenal, there would be an argument that a Trump win might even be the least worst option, because it would undermine American leadership of the 'international community', which has been so utterly toxic for decades.  For example, why else are some European countries so slavishly loyal to the Netanyahu regime, no matter how many atrocities it commits?  It's because US politicians are bought and paid for by the Israel lobby, and many European governments think, say and do whatever the Americans tell them to think, say and do.  A Trump win could indirectly stop that destructive cycle, because European voters will no longer recognise the US government as representing moral leadership.

Budget disaster for Labour in Scotland: bombshell Norstat poll shows SNP surging into big lead

I said on Wednesday that the initial reaction of commentators to a Budget often bears little resemblance to the actual political impact of that Budget after a little time has elapsed.  We may be seeing that phenomenon here, because in the hours after Rachel Reeves' speech, Scottish Labour figures and Labour-supporting journalists in Scotland were pretty bullish in their belief that she had found an alchemy that would set them up for success against the SNP.  And yet the first post-Budget poll in Scotland shows Labour nosediving.  That doesn't appear to be a coincidence, because the supplementary questions of the poll show that, even though many of the individual Budget measures command public support, there are pluralities who feel that the overall package is bad for households and bad for Scotland as a whole.

Scottish Parliament constituency ballot:

SNP 33% (-)

Labour 23% (-7)

Conservatives 15% (+3)

Reform UK 11% (+2)

Liberal Democrats 10% (+2)

Greens 6% (+1)

Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:

SNP 29% (+1)

Labour 22% (-6)

Conservatives 14% (-)

Reform UK 11% (+2)

Greens 9% (+1)

Liberal Democrats 9% (+2)

Alba 3% (-2)

Seats projection: SNP 51, Labour 29, Conservatives 16, Reform UK 12, Liberal Democrats 11, Greens 10

There's an important caveat here: four GB-wide polls have also been conducted since the Budget and three of those have shown Labour holding steady.  So if there is a Budget effect that is causing Labour to plummet in Scotland, it's odd that there isn't an equivalent Britain-wide effect.  Perhaps that's one reason to be sceptical, or at least cautious, about the trend that Norstat are showing.  But at the very least it looks like the Budget hasn't helped Labour's popularity.

In spite of the unexpectedly quick improvement of the SNP's polling position relative to Labour's since the general election, one thing we've had to keep reminding ourselves is that the SNP only looked well-placed to retain power in 2026, rather than to retain the overall pro-independence majority in the Scottish Parliament.  For the first time, this poll offers a scenario in which it starts to look just about plausible that the pro-independence majority could be rescued.  The SNP and Greens in combination are projected to have 61 seats - just 4 short of the 65 required for a majority.

There are different ways in which that shortfall could potentially be bridged, but it looks as if seats for Alba are unlikely to play any part.  As has been well-rehearsed, Norstat and their predecessor firm Panelbase have a history of significantly overstating Alba support, showing the party on 5% or 6% when the real figure was around 2%.  That was why there was a lot of wishful thinking involved when Alba claimed that the last Norstat poll, which showed them on 5%, was an indication that they were on course for list seats.  But now that even Norstat have them on only 3%, it's clear that Alba are not heading for list seats as things stand and that something will have to fundamentally change if a breakthrough is to be made.  I know that some people in Alba believed that the shock of Alex Salmond's death would in itself lead to a boost in support, but that certainly doesn't seem to have happened.

Once again, there's good news for the SNP in the leaders' ratings. Although John Swinney is in negative territory at -11, that still makes him slightly more popular than Anas Sarwar at -17, and far more popular than Keir Starmer at -36.  Russell Findlay has a poor opening score of -28, although admittedly that's a significant improvement on his predecessor Douglas Ross.

Interestingly, of the six individual Budget measures asked about in the poll, the only one respondents oppose (albeit narrowly) is providing £3 billion in funding to Ukraine "for as long as it takes".  That certainly wouldn't have been the case at the start of the war.  Perhaps voters have noticed that a First World War type stalemate has occurred and that resources are disappearing into a sort of 'death factory' rather than anything that will change the trajectory of the conflict. Or perhaps cynicism is creeping in, because it's so clear that the UK government will do whatever it takes to help Ukraine against Russian aggression, but will do absolutely nothing to aid the far more vulnerable population of Gaza against the Israeli-perpetrated genocide.

Bill Clinton blows up his own reputation by embracing the discourse of genocide

Jimmy Carter, who recently celebrated his 100th birthday, is widely regarded as the classic example of someone who performed exceptionally well as an ex-president.  No-one could accuse Bill Clinton of aiming for a similar accolade.  Indeed with a single deranged pro-genocide speech, he may have just destroyed his reputation as both a president and ex-president forever.  That might seem like an overstatement, but you have to remember that the only reason there is even any debate over whether what Clinton said was acceptable is that we're currently in a sort of antechamber where it's still possible to maintain the fiction that genocide is not occurring because Israel isn't allowing access to journalists to actually document the atrocities.  But that situation won't last forever - eventually journalists and academic researchers will get into Gaza and reliable estimates of the death toll will emerge.  It'll almost certainly be in the hundreds of thousands, taking into account both those directly murdered by the Israeli military and those who died of starvation and disease due to Israel depriving them of the essentials of life.

Once that happens, the discussion will move on to how on earth the genocide was permitted to occur.  And as with previous genocides such as Rwanda and the Holocaust, there will be a lot of focus on the way in which genocidal language was normalised, for example Israeli officials suggesting that all residents of Gaza are legitimate targets because they are 'human animals' or because they supposedly all support Hamas.  Or an equally good example is Clinton stating that large numbers of innocent people "have" to be mass murdered by Israel because Hamas is hiding behind them.  That evades the obvious point that if one Hamas fighter is hiding behind 400 civilians, you actually have the option not to massacre the 400 civilians because you have the moral sense to know that in doing so you'd be committing a war crime every bit as grave as the one you claim to be avenging.  Always assuming, of course, you actually believe that the Hamas fighter is hiding behind the 400 in the first place, and that you aren't using that as a flimsy excuse because your real and sole aim to is to massacre the 400 as part of a step by step plan to drastically reduce the Arab population of Gaza.

And just as the Nazis prepared the ground for genocide by advancing pseudoscientific gibberish about racial superiority, it'll be considered highly significant that Clinton prayed in aid a mythology of racial entitlement to the land, with the Israelis' actions justified on the ahistorical basis that they were there in the time of King David, long before the Palestinians' own religion was created.  In truth, historians are sceptical as to whether King David actually existed, but even if he did, using the events of thousands of years ago as the basis for a racial hierarchy would undoubtedly give Native Amerìcans free license to do to Bill Clinton and millions of people like him exactly what Israel is currently doing to the Palestinians.

Last but not least, Clinton tried to resurrect his own equivalent of Hitler's "stab in the back" myth by arguing that he has inside knowledge from the Camp David talks at the end of his own presidency that all the ills of the region, including the lack of a Palestinian state, had nothing to do with the Israelis, but were instead the fault of Yasser Arafat, who supposedly torpedoed the most generous offer in the history of the known universe because he was so hellbent on eradicating Israel and having a Palestinian state on 100% of the territory of historic Palestine.  The reality, of course, couldn't be more different.  Arafat conceded before the 2000 talks even began that the 1967 boundaries were the baseline, meaning that Israel would be keeping 78% of historic Palestine, a position far closer to Benjamin Netanyahu's lebensraum fantasy than to the total destruction of Israel. But that, of course, was not enough for the Israelis, who demanded -

* Just over one-tenth of the West Bank, recognised by the international community as indisputably Palestinan territory, would be confiscated by Israel.

* There would be no proper compensation for this land grab.  There would be a nominal "land swap", but the amount of Israeli territory transferred to the Palestinian state would be little over one-tenth the size of the confiscated Palestinian land.

* The land grab would split the Palestinian sovereign territory in the West Bank into three non-contiguous segments.  Adding in the fourth segment of the state in Gaza, this would make Palestine one of the most non-contiguous states in the world, evoking an obvious comparison with "Bantustans".

* The Palestinian state would be demilitarised and Israel would have a veto on any alliances it entered into.  Its airspace would also be controlled by Israel - an absolutely absurd demand that no self-respecting sovereign state would ever agree to.

* Palestinian refugees would have to give up their right to return to their homes in Israel, even though they were violently and illegally displaced by Israeli forces.

* The vast bulk of the conquered Arab-dominated East Jerusalem would be annexed by Israel.  At best, Palestine would be allowed to cobble together some of the newer outlying suburbs, artificially call it "the city of East Jerusalem" and make it the capital.

* Most crucially, Arafat was told that any agreement required him to permanently renounce any further "demands". More than anything else, this made agreement utterly impossible, because the Israeli proposals on issues like Jerusalem and airspace were so inherently unfair and so obviously justified only by blackmail due to Israel's present-day military strength that the only way Arafat could ever agree to them in good conscience was on a provisional basis subject to a review.

Really the only mistake Arafat made in 2000 was to wrongly take Clinton for an honest broker.  Clinton was playing an each-way bet - he was happy enough to pose as peacemaker if he bullied the Palestinians into accepting a deal that would permanently stitch them up.  But just as good for him was for the Palestinians to sensibly walk away, allowing him to self-righteously "stand with Israel" and to spend the next few decades lying through his teeth about what had just happened and who was to blame for it.

Tonight, Matthew, BMG stands for "Bong! Majority's Gone": Labour fall behind in a GB-wide poll for the first time since 2021

The general assumption is that Kemi Badenoch is just minutes away from becoming leader of the Conservative Party, and I expect that assumption to prove correct - although other types of election have proved highly unpredictable in recent years, ballots of Tory members have always played out exactly as billed. If so, Badenoch will surprisingly be inheriting an outright Tory lead, and the question now is whether Tory leads will become the norm over the next four or five years.  In spite of her own obvious shortcomings, that may well be the case.

BMG poll of GB-wide voting intentions (30th-31st October):

Conservatives 29%
Labour 28%
Reform UK 17%
Liberal Democrats 13%
Greens 8%

The fieldwork dates for the poll were the day of the Budget and the day after, although the impression given is that it's a post-Budget poll, ie. the Wednesday fieldwork started after Rachel Reeves had finished her speech.  If so, this is particularly disappointing for Labour, because it suggests that what they thought of as their trump card hasn't staved off crossover.

That said, there's also a Techne poll with similar fieldwork dates showing a slight increase in the Labour lead, albeit well within the margin of error and statistically insignificant.

Between the Trussmageddon of September 2022 and the general election of July 2024, the Tories never even came close to claiming the lead in a single poll.  They seemed to have Everest to climb, and yet it's taken only four months of the public seeing what Starmer is actually like in power for that Everest to be climbed.  In Scotland the hope must be that this will translate into a sustained SNP lead.

Has the Reeves Budget produced anything that would stand in the way of an SNP win in 2026?

Just a quick note to let you know that I have an article at The National about whether Rachel Reeves' first Budget today will help to arrest Labour's tumble in popularity.  You can read it HERE.

The Find Out Now poll showed a Yes majority even though 16 and 17 year olds weren't interviewed

Thanks to Paul Kirkwood on Twitter for pointing out to me that the data tables are now available for the recent Find Out Now poll showing a majority in favour of independence.  It's a single question poll (or if there were other questions they haven't been released yet), so there's not a huge amount to add, but there are a few points of interest.

Firstly, the poll excluded 16 and 17 year olds, not for any sinister reason but simply because the Find Out Now panel is comprised of over-18s only.  When I commissioned a Find Out Now poll eighteen months ago, they actually managed to source the necessary number of 16 and 17 year old respondents from another polling panel, but that may not have been possible this time, or it may have just been decided not to do that because of cost. Whatever the exact reason, it means there's a chance that the Yes vote is being slightly underestimated even at 52%.

The turnout adjustment was decisive in pushing Yes into the lead in this poll.  Before the adjustment, No was ahead by 52% to 48%, and after the adjustment there was an exact reversal, with Yes ahead by 52% to 48%.  That doesn't in any way invalidate the result, because almost all polling firms use a turnout filter, but it does demonstrate the greater enthusiasm levels among Yes voters.

It's specified that the poll result was weighted by gender, age, region, and recalled vote from the 2024 general election.  If that's an exhaustive list, it means there was no weighting by recalled referendum vote in 2014, which would be a very good thing, and other polling firms would be wise to learn from that example, because weighting by a vote from more than a decade ago (with all the dangers of false recall) is getting into the realms of the ridiculous now. However, this methodological difference isn't necessarily the reason for Find Out Now being one of the more Yes-friendly pollsters.  If memory serves me right, they did introduce 2014 weighting at one point but it didn't change their results much.

I always wince when people start treating the regional voting breakdowns as gospel, because the subsample for each region is far too small to produce meaningful results. However, for what it's worth Glasgow has the highest Yes vote in this poll and the Highlands & Islands has the lowest.

A significant minority of independence supporters may have drifted back to Labour at the general election, but that doesn't mean they were giving up on independence.  The poll shows that 25% of people who voted Labour in July would vote for independence, and that rises to 28% if Don't Knows are stripped out.

Depressingly, the old gender gap we'd hoped we'd seen the last of is evident in this poll - there's a bulky Yes majority among men but a slender No majority among women.

*  *  *

SCOT GOES POP FUNDRAISER 2024: THE FINAL PUSH

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