So, with the caveat that this is only a subsample from a GB poll, albeit a relatively large one that has probably been correctly structured and weighted, here is YouGov’s latest estimate of Scottish voting intentions for tomorrow’s European election…
SNP 40%, Brexit Party 23%, Liberal Democrats 12%, Greens 9%, Labour 7%, Conservatives 7%, UKIP 2%, Change UK 1%
The seats allocation on those numbers would be: SNP 3, Brexit Party 2, Liberal Democrats 1.
I’d suggest that would be a ‘curate’s egg’ outcome as far as momentum for the independence campaign is concerned – the SNP would gain a seat and would record an all-time high both in terms of votes and seats, and the Ruth Davidson No More Referendums (Theresa May Sponsored Referendums Are OK) Party would be wiped out. But you can guarantee that the unionist media would focus all their attention on the two seats for the Brexit Party, because that would supposedly show that Scotland is nowhere near as pro-European as Nicola Sturgeon portrays. What we really need is for the Brexit Party to only win one seat, and for there to be four pro-indy seats (ideally four SNP seats, but three SNP and one Green would be the next best thing). That’s still a perfectly plausible outcome, but it depends on the Brexit Party being a tad less popular than these numbers suggest. There’s no way of engineering it through tactical voting – the only control we can have over it is to raise turnout by getting the pro-indy vote out, because it’s pretty likely that the lower the turnout, the better Farage will do.
Incidentally, although the polls have been consistently saying that the SNP should win either three or four seats, I still have some concerns that they might end up with only two. It’s not just the fact that they’ve underperformed expectations in recent European elections – think also of their 32% showing at the local elections two years ago, which was way, way below what the opinion polls would have led us to expect. (That even caught John Curtice out – he was still talking about 40% as a potentially disappointing outcome for the SNP well after the results started to come in.) So there’s no room at all for complacency, and we need to get every pro-indy voter we can find to the polling stations tomorrow.
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Here’s the latest in Phantom Power’s acclaimed Journey to Yes series of films, this time featuring a certain Portuguese-born Yes supporter who will be familiar to a lot of us from Twitter…
