Perhaps these polls reflect other social issues like abortion, gay marriage and immigration, where the differences between the candidates are polarized, thanks to party litmus tests.
He's one of very very few Welsh politicians with anything like widespread public recognition and enjoys untrammelled authority over his party thanks to the thumping mandate from the 2009 leadership election.
The LDP has survived as Japan's governing party thanks mainly to the financial and political support it enjoys from many of the private-sector companies whose bad debts now plague the banking sector.
Still, for years afterwards the Republicans were able to wield great influence as a minority party thanks to a rule that required a two-thirds supermajority in both chambers to pass a budget.
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But very likely, thanks to the Tea Party, and a new Constitutional spirit, the pendulum is about to swing back.
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The WiiU is going to have a lot more third party support, thanks to the fact that its graphical capabilities will finally at least be on par with the current generation.
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This time, too, thanks to the tea-party movement, plenty of the Republican freshmen in the new House will once again be conservative ideologues, relishing another chance to gum up the administration of an activist Democratic president.
This is because the largest Serbian opposition group, the ultranationalist Radical Party, has imploded thanks to an internal war between the devotees of Vojislav Seselj, currently standing trial for war crimes at the United Nations' tribunal in The Hague, and the allies of the more pragmatic Tomislav Nikolic, who led the party within Serbia.
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Social TV had its coming out party this year, mainly thanks to live events.
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The Social Democrats are still well ahead, but for the first time in two years they are losing ground, thanks to a new liberal-conservative party that calls itself the Civic Platform, or plain Platform, which is bidding spiritedly for the middle ground.
The ruling centre-right Popular Party of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar -- a staunch opponent of Basque self-determination -- emerged as the region's second political force thanks to its alliance with the smaller conservative party.
He has the makings of a competent economic team, thanks to an election alliance with the small Liberal party, led by Stefanos Manos, a former economy minister.
Skobbler has had some success in the mobile mapping market, thanks in part to iOS's historical first-party weakness in the area.
But thanks to Mr Thaksin, in future no Thai political party can expect to win an election without a popular and well-promoted platform.
Mr Shevardnadze's pro-western party did rather well, getting 42% of the vote and, thanks to the country's electoral system, an absolute majority of seats.
During his 32 years in power, President Suharto faced little threat from the ballot box, thanks to his control of the army and his leadership of Golkar, the ruling party.
Thanks to a ballot initiative in 1996, voters will chose between all candidates regardless of their party registration.
When five regional presidents in France, each from the mainstream right, were elected in 1998 thanks to pacts with the far-right National Front, all were instantly expelled from their party.
Thanks to Britain's first-past-the-post electoral system, one political party may monopolise the seats on a local authority with less than half the votes of the 30% of the electorate who turned out to vote.
Now, thanks to MPs' gossip, we have a glimpse of how the prime minister speaks to his party rebels.
Thanks to the new uncertainty about Mr Kohl, pressure is growing on Mr Lafontaine to announce his party's candidate well before the Lower Saxony poll.
Although it is hard to pin down the reasons, Martin Wattenberg, of the University of California at Irvine, points out that turnout has fallen most sharply in countries where parties are weak: Switzerland (thanks to those referendums), America and France (where presidential elections have become increasingly candidate- rather than party-centred), and Japan (where political loyalties revolve around ties to internal factions rather than the party itself).
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