Now, this is one of those phrases with which I have a peculiar personal problem. This is bad enough when applied to, say, Clinton and Gore, but when Frank infiltrates the image, you will understand that it becomes truly terrifying. Then there was the question of the ticket . Vote the straight Labour ticket, people were enjoined. This usage of straight is itself an Americanism.
Ticket certainly is.
Now, of course, language must import or die, but the trading does seem to have become rather one-way of late. Spin doctor, a phrase which has overtones of baseball, is also American, and only came into common usage here in the mid-1980s, after the dream ticket took over the Labour party. And dark horse came from Disraeli's novel The Young Duke. But he actually meant it originally in a horse-racing context rather than a political one. Now, however, the exports seemed to have dried up while America's ugliest words infest our media.