There still haven’t been any full-scale Scottish polls during the election campaign, and indeed there have only been two full-scale Scottish polls since Boris Johnson became Prime Minister and since Ruth Davidson threw the towel in. That seems incredible when you bear in mind how crucial Scotland could be to the outcome of the whole election. Something will turn up sooner or later, but in the meantime the best we have to go on are YouGov’s Scottish subsamples, which do have a very large margin of error due to the small sample size, but nevertheless are superior to other firms’ subsamples as a result of being correctly structured and weighted. There have been two YouGov subsamples published since the campaign got underway, and both have been favourable for the SNP.
29th-30th October: SNP 44%, Conservatives 19%, Liberal Democrats 10%, Labour 9%, Brexit Party 8%, Greens 8%
31st October-1st November: SNP 50%, Conservatives 22%, Labour 15%, Liberal Democrats 10%, Greens 2%, Brexit Party 1%
It may well be that the SNP are appearing to do better than usual due to random sampling variation, but everything feels like reasonably plain sailing so far. I truly believe the biggest threat by far to the SNP’s position is the broadcasters’ attempted stitch-up of the leaders’ debates. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was just the one ITV debate, but every instinct in my body tells me that the BBC and Sky will both attempt exactly the same stunt. Stephen Bush of the New Statesman seems to be taking seriously the possibility that the Liberal Democrats will succeed in challenging the debate formats, so I hope the SNP aren’t caught napping on this – if the Lib Dems manage to muscle their way into the debates, the SNP have got to be ready to muscle in too. The only thing that would be even more outrageous than the current proposed format would be three-way debates in which the third-largest Commons party is still excluded.
There’s remarkable Britain-wide opposition to the broadcasters’ plans in the YouGov poll – 53% of respondents think all of the major parties, including the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens, should be involved in the leaders’ debates. Just 10% think it should be a straight Johnson v Corbyn affair, and only 9% think there should be three-cornered debates involving Johnson, Corbyn and Swinson. In the Scottish subsample, support for the SNP being involved rises to 73% – and just 5% back ITV’s two-way format.
