It’s truly astonishing – we’re three weeks into this campaign and we still haven’t had a full-scale Scottish poll (apart from an out-of-date one from YouGov). Until that changes, I’m going to keep posting averages from the five most recent Scottish subsamples conducted by YouGov, because that’s the best available substitute. Unlike Scottish subsamples from other firms, YouGov’s appear to be correctly structured and weighted – which means the only problem with them is the large margin of error caused by the small sample size.
YouGov subsample average:
SNP 43.2%
Conservatives 25.6%
Labour 12.6%
Liberal Democrats 11.2%
Brexit Party 3.8%
Greens 3.4%
The most discernible trend over the course of the campaign has been a Tory recovery, but that’s been at the expense of the Brexit Party and possibly the Liberal Democrats, rather than the SNP. It’s actually quite impressive how well the SNP vote is holding up at a time when their main opponent is gaining ground. But the big concern is that the rigged TV debates could lead to a repeat of the 2017 scenario where the Tory surge didn’t seem to be the end of the world until the SNP suddenly had to fight on a second front due to the late Labour comeback.
Note that the Tory recovery isn’t completely factored in to the average yet, because two of the five subsamples were conducted before Farage decided not to contest Tory seats. In today’s subsample, the Tories are on 28% of the vote, which almost takes them back to where they were in 2017. But because the SNP vote is higher than it was two years ago, a uniform swing would still result in the Tories losing seats to the SNP. The seats projection from the average, based on the Electoral Calculus model, is –
SNP 47 (+12), Conservatives 7 (-6), Liberal Democrats 4 (n/c), Labour 1 (-6)
Incidentally, today’s YouGov poll bucks the recent trend across the polling industry by showing Labour eating into the GB-wide Tory lead a little. But that may be just a reversion to the mean, because the last poll was particularly favourable for the Tories, putting them on 45% – which would be the highest share of the vote for any party in a UK general election since the 1970s.
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