I head back home Saturday morning, but here's some stuff that might be of interest.
First of all, Blair's margin of victory is looking quite thin, after the Guardian editors analyze the rebel numbers in the Labour ranks.
87 of them have ... voted against the whips on 10 occasions or more.
Of these, 27 are no longer in the Commons and/or in receipt of the Labour whip: 16 retired, nine were defeated, one has died, and one, George Galloway, was expelled from the party.
This leaves 60 MPs with rebel form knocking around on the government backbenches [...]
Given Tony Blair's much reduced majority, it would only take just over half of these 60 to vote against the government to defeat it. Brace yourself. There are troubles ahead.
Next is a piece by yours truly trying to measure the
Lib Dem's performance in this election.
Interestingly enough, the Iraq strategy was not designed to win votes on the war. "We found that voters had already discounted Blair on the war and trust issues," Lib Dem consultant Rick Ridder said of focus group testing carried out in early February.
"It was already in the calculus, so new information didn't change voter attitudes. What [those events] did was force greater attention to the Lib Dems. We moved up a couple of points - not because of the Iraq issue itself, but because the focus was on the other party."
When the dust settled, the Lib Dems had gained four points from 2001, and won 11 additional seats: lower than hoped, but it still gave them plenty to be excited about.
"The real number is that the Lib Dems moved into second place in over 160 constituencies, which is 50 more than they had in 2001, so they've moved up increasingly as the alternative party," Mr Ridder said. "In a three party system, you have to get to second place before you can win.
Finally, I took a look at pollster performance in the race. Conventional wisdom this side of the pond is that Labour always polls better than the final results. But if that was previously the case, it
wasn't so this time. All the major polls in the race were pretty good. But the same couldn't be said about the BBC's nifty
seat calculator.