I’ve tried to keep the arrival of this latest exclusive Scot Goes Pop poll under wraps, but my interests do betray me, and there was at least one person on Twitter who clocked that the Panelbase survey under way over the last few days was probably commissioned by me! If you saw the video teaser earlier, you’ll already know the list results from the Scottish Parliament voting intentions, but as I mentioned, the constituency results show more extensive changes.
Scottish Parliament constituency ballot voting intentions (Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll):
SNP 45% (-2)
Labour 22% (+2)
Conservatives 20% (-3)
Liberal Democrats 8% (+2)
Greens 4% (-)
Scottish Parliament regional list ballot voting intentions:
SNP 36% (-)
Conservatives 21% (-1)
Labour 18% (+1)
Greens 10% (+1)
Alba 6% (-)
Liberal Democrats 6% (-)
All for Unity 2% (-)
On behalf of Scot Goes Pop, the polling company Panelbase interviewed a representative sample of 1075 adults in Scotland, including 16 and 17 year olds, from 21st-26th April.
Seats projection (with changes from 2016 election): SNP 61 (-2), Conservatives 24 (-7), Labour 20 (-4), Greens 11 (+5), Alba 8 (+8), Liberal Democrats 5 (-)
Pro-independence parties: 80 seats (62.0%)
Anti-independence parties: 49 seats (38.0%)
PRO-INDEPENDENCE MAJORITY OF 31 SEATS
So Labour are gaining a bit of traction and moving ahead of the Tories, but ironically only on the constituency ballot, and not on the regional list ballot where they actually need it. That would leave them stuck firmly in third place in terms of seats. The Greens are probably overestimated on the constituency ballot because they’re only standing in a dozen constituency seats, so the SNP can confidently expect to take some (but not all) of the Greens’ 4% vote share.
But the big story is Alba’s showing on the list. This is the third Panelbase poll in succession to show the new pro-independence party on 6%, but in this case the seats projection is even more favourable than before, with Alex Salmond on course to lead an eight-strong group at Holyrood – bigger than the Greens and Liberal Democrats had in the previous parliament. If that’s how it turns out, Alba will arguably have succeeded in bringing about the ‘supermajority’ they promised, albeit with the Greens playing a crucial role as well. Pro-indy parties in combination are projected to have 80 seats, which amounts to 62% of the 129 seats in the parliament.
The key is that the Greens and Alba are doing well at the same time – it’s not as if there’s just a rearranging of the deckchairs with one pro-indy party gaining list seats at the expense of another. Only 70% of people who voted SNP in the 2019 Westminster general election are planning to vote SNP on the list this year, but the vast majority of the others are going to other pro-indy parties – 11% to Alba and 13% to the Greens. And the figures are very similar among Yes voters from 2014 – 12% are voting Alba on the list and 14% for the Greens, with 60% in the SNP column.
On the constituency ballot, Labour take 16% of people who voted Tory in 2019, while the Tories only take 5% of those who voted Labour two years ago. But the equivalent numbers on the list are much closer (13% and 9% respectively), which explains why Labour aren’t making enough headway on the more important of the two ballots.
Curiously, the seats projection shows an exact repeat of the 2016 result in the constituency ballot, with Labour holding all of their three constituency seats. Whether that’s actually what would happen is hard to say, given that they should really have lost Dumbarton and East Lothian last time. All of the changes are on the list seat allocation.
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There are lots more questions to come from this poll – Westminster voting intention numbers, independence voting intention numbers, and a number of supplementary question that should be of considerable interest to the whole independence movement. If you’d like to be the first to know when they’re released, feel free to follow me on Twitter HERE.
