The mystery I mentioned in the previous post has been solved much quicker than expected – and to be fair, it appears (just this once) that nothing sinister was going on. The reason why the Scottish subsample was missing from the datasets of the YouGov mega-poll commissioned by the People’s Vote campaign was, it seems, that it was being withheld for publication later on as a full-scale poll in its own right, which has now happened. The results are devastating for Labour, and they’re not much better for the Tories either.
Scottish voting intentions for the next Westminster election:
SNP 40% (n/c)
Conservatives 25% (-2)
Labour 21% (-2)
Liberal Democrats 8% (+1)
Greens 3% (+1)
UKIP 2% (+1)
The percentage changes listed above are from the last published full-scale Scottish poll from YouGov, which was conducted many months ago. If anything, the SNP’s 40% share might be seen as being on the lower end of expectations, given how well they’ve been doing in recent YouGov subsamples (never lower than 40% and reaching as high as 46%). But of course what really matter in a first-past-the-post election is the gap between a party and its competitors – and the SNP’s lead over both the Tories and Labour has essentially doubled since the June 2017 election.
More details and analysis to follow…
