For some time, most polls for “Who’d make the best UK Prime Minister?” – the stat that really decides who wins general elections – have shown a solid lead for “Don’t know”, narrowly ahead of Theresa May and a long way ahead of Jeremy Corbyn.
It’s a prime symptom of a UK-wide contempt for politicians the magnitude of which we’ve never seen in our lifetime, and Scottish voters are in no way immune.
We loaded this question from our latest Panelbase poll in the party leaders’ favours, because you don’t have to think any of them is doing a GOOD job to say that one of them is doing the BEST job out of the four. Everything is relative – and we also didn’t ask the question specifically about Brexit.
But even with those get-outs, “They’re all useless” came out on top by a clear seven points over Nicola Sturgeon, and the rest weren’t even at the races.
SNP and Tory voters were most loyal to their own leaders, with just 25% of Lib Dem supporters backing Vince Cable and a truly dismal 21% of Scottish Labour voters picking Jeremy Corbyn – just 2% higher than the number of Labour voters who picked Nicola Sturgeon, and less than half the number who said “None of them”.
And SNP voters were the only ones who (and by an overwhelming margin of 69-21) backed their leader over nobody – while 45% of Tories did pick Theresa May, that was still less than the 49% who said everyone was terrible.
The FM also came out well on top among Remain voters, 41% of whom rated her the highest compared to 32% picking the “none” option, with none of the other three leaders even making double figures.
But on the Leave side, Theresa May trailed to “nobody” by more than 20 points, gathering barely over a quarter of the vote, with a rather surprising 14% also plumping for Nicola Sturgeon.
Jeremy Corbyn scored just 8% and 5% with the two groups, suggesting that perhaps his “constructive ambiguity” policy isn’t proving the unifying vote-winner he hoped for, and Vince Cable’s performance among both Lib Dem and Remain voters is pretty shocking given that the Lib Dems have the most unequivocally pro-EU, pro-second-referendum (not YOU, Scotland) stance of all the parties.
The other big gap was on age, with the SNP leader being very noticeably more popular with young voters than middle-aged or older ones. In the 16-34 age group she led Theresa May by almost 4:1, but among over-55s it was almost a dead heat, and “none of the above” won the middle and older age groups by a mile.
Jeremy Corbyn’s appalling approval rating with Scotland’s young people, meanwhile, was particularly notable.
While Nicola Sturgeon will be justly pleased at being by a long distance the best of an absolutely awful bunch, more than 30% of her own voters (and nearly 60% of Remain voters) still weren’t impressed.
At a point in history where politics is playing a bigger part in people’s lives than at any time in living memory, the public’s loathing of, and lack of trust in, its elected representatives is at unprecedentedly stratospheric levels. And that should be a sobering thought for all of us.
