The datasets for last weekend’s Panelbase poll were published a couple of days ago. Regardless of whether Don’t Knows are excluded or not, the headline figures on independence are identical to the other very recent Panelbase poll commissioned by Business for Scotland, so unsurprisingly the detailed numbers for different demographic groups haven’t changed much either. But there is one small point that marks the new poll out from all of the previous five Panelbase polls conducted in this calendar year. Look at how the percentage of Conservative voters who say they support independence has changed over time…
Percentage of Conservative voters who support independence (Panelbase polls in 2020):
2% (28th-31st January)
2% (24th-26th March)
4% (1st-5th May)
3% (1st-5th June)
5% (15th-19th June)
9% (30th June – 3rd July)
Tory voters are the one group who in recent years have been virtually unanimous in their opposition to independence – you don’t get anything like such lopsided numbers among other typically anti-indy groups such as Brexit supporters and people who were born in England. But are things starting to change just slightly? Not necessarily, because the number of respondents involved is small, and it’s possible the unusually high figure of 9% was produced by random sampling variation. This is well worth keeping an eye on for the future, though. Remember in the poll that I commissioned a month ago, one of the supplementary questions found that Tory voters were split down the middle on whether the Scottish public would be more safe or less safe if the UK government’s powers relating to the lockdown were transferred to the Scottish government, which is not what you’d normally expect at all. The events of the pandemic may have caused some constitutional soul-searching in some very surprising places.
