Janet Mills has been a candidate since October, but she hasn't been a huge visible or audible presence in the race, especially in contrast to her opponent, Platner, whose campaign has been built around steady and relentless engagement with voters.
Effectively, Ukraine is portrayed as a main enemy, said Zsuzsanna Vegh, an analyst at the German Marshall Fund. This is not just about Ukraine per se, but it fits into the standard strategy of the governing party, of mobilising its electorate through generating fear in society.
F or my party-the Conservative Party of Canada-2025 was an annus horribilis. We suffered a string of strategic missteps, failed to break through to voters on the issues that dominated the national conversation, and paid the price in both public confidence and political momentum. I won't revisit every episode here, but we must acknowledge the reality of a very difficult year and learn from it.
One of the truly ancient debates in U.S. political circles is whether candidates in highly competitive partisan elections can best win by persuading swing voters or mobilizing base voters. There's no absolute identity between ideology and strategy, but speaking generally, right- or left-wing ideologues tend to adopt base mobilization strategies that don't require any accommodation of the other party's views. Republican or Democratic "moderates" generally hew to the "median voter theory" that winning over a swing voter is especially effective because it adds a vote to one's own column while denying a vote to the opposing candidate. So they value cross-over voting as much as turnout advantages.
Hungarian politicians from the country's ruling right-wing populist Fidesz party accuse national conservative opposition leader Peter Magyar of all sorts of things. They say that the 44-year-old leader of the Tisza party and favorite for the parliamentary elections in spring 2026 is a Brussels mercenary. They call him a Ukrainian agent and a warmonger who wants to forcibly recruit Hungarian men.
Some supporters have suggested that one way around the prohibition would be for Trump to run as vice president, while another candidate stood for election as president and resigned, letting Trump again assume the presidency. "I'd be allowed to do that," Trump said on Monday, in an exchange with reporters aboard Air Force One as he flew from Malaysia to Tokyo. But he added: "I wouldn't do that. I think it's too cute. Yeah, I would rule that out because it's too cute. I think the people wouldn't like that. It's too cute. It's not - it wouldn't be right."
Being ignored is a nightmare for any politician. You don't win votes if no-one knows who you are. You don't get a tick in the box if the name on the ballot paper means nothing to the voter clutching their stubby pencil in the voting booth. In the last couple of years the Liberal Democrat leader, Sir Ed Davey, has bungee-jumped, jet-skied, and even ridden a hobby horse into the public's imagination.
