I woke up this morning to people fretting about a ‘bad’ Survation poll in the Daily Record, although in fact it’s not as bad as you’d think if you inhaled the Record‘s reporting. For some unknown reason (well, we can probably guess), they’ve used percentage changes from the Holyrood election of 2016 rather than from the last comparable poll – giving the misleading impression of a very sharp and sudden drop in SNP support. They don’t actually make clear whether this is an online or telephone poll, but assuming it’s online (the vast majority of Record-commissioned polls are), here are the correct figures with percentage changes measured from the last online Survation poll that was published around three weeks ago –
Scottish Parliament constituency ballot:
SNP 38% (-5)
Conservatives 26% (+2)
Labour 25% (+2)
Liberal Democrats 9% (n/c)
Scottish Parliament regional list ballot:
SNP 32% (n/c)
Labour 23% (n/c)
Conservatives 23% (+2)
Greens 9% (-1)
Liberal Democrats 9% (+1)
Westminster:
SNP 36% (-5)
Conservatives 27% (+1)
Labour 26% (+2)
Should Scotland be an independent country?
Yes 45% (-2)
No 55% (+2)
Although the changes aren’t as dramatic as the Record are making out, the SNP are significantly down on two of three ballots (strangely they’re not down at all on the Holyrood list). It’s hard to make much sense of that, because three polls were published at the time of the SNP conference (two Survation, one Panelbase), which all agreed that the SNP had come through the reporting of the Alex Salmond story unscathed. So if there has been a setback, it must have occurred over the course of October, and I can’t think of any obvious recent trigger for a 5-point drop. My own instinct is that this is much more likely to be random sampling variation – ie. within the standard margin of error, the sample Survation interviewed this time may have been a bit SNP/Yes-light. We’ll have to wait for the next poll or two to find out for sure.
More details and analysis to follow…
