Alba hits 4% in landmark new Panelbase poll – the highest Alba share in any poll since before the 2021 Holyrood election, and potentially enough for Alex Salmond’s party to win a Scottish Parliament list seat

One of the peculiarities of polling information in relation to the Alba Party is that Panelbase consistently produced better showings for Alba prior to the 2021 election than other pollsters did, and yet after that election Panelbase completely stopped offering Alba as an option – it was as if they thought the party had to all intents and purposes ceased to exist, which of course is far from the case.  As far as I’m aware, no other polling firm followed that example – Alba has continued to be offered by other firms as an option of some sort, even though to access that option, respondents often have to first select the generic “some other party” option in the initial limited menu, at which point they’re taken to a second menu of options.

The new bang-up-to-date Panelbase poll has been commissioned by the Alba Party itself, which has presumably influenced the decision to bring Alba back as an option.  However, I can assure you that this poll will have been conducted with scrupulous fairness and the results can be regarded as credible.  I’ve seen the data tables, and in any case I’ve been through this process myself enough times to know that in line with normal practice, Panelbase will have asked all voting intention questions at the very start of the question sequence, meaning respondents will not have been influenced in any way whatsoever by the wording of the supplementary questions that followed later.  The wording of the voting intention questions were identical to previous Panelbase polls, and therefore the fact that Alba were the client in this particular poll is irrelevant to the outcome (with the possible exception of the simple fact that Alba were offered as an option – but frankly, given that Alba received 2% of the list vote last year, they absolutely warrant inclusion anyway).

It’s important to stress that the inclusion of Alba means that the results are not strictly comparable with the most recent Panelbase polls. I’ve included the percentage changes from the last Panelbase poll purely for information, although the drop in the SNP vote probably needs to be seen in that context – it would likely be a lesser drop if Alba had been included in both polls (ie. because the SNP would have been on a lower vote to begin with).  Alba are on a higher percentage of the list vote in this poll than in any poll conducted by any firm since the 2021 election.

Now, I know some people will claim that Panelbase were the most Alba-friendly pollster in the 2021 election campaign, and their results turned out to be wrong, and that therefore a Panelbase poll showing Alba on a higher list vote than other pollsters are currently reporting can’t be taken seriously.  But that really depends on whether the factors that led to the overestimation of Alba last year are still in place.  It’s true that Panelbase don’t appear to weight their results by recalled 2021 vote, which would be one potential way of correcting any error – instead the political weighting is only by recalled 2019 Westminster vote and by recalled 2014 indyref vote.  However, I’ve always had the feeling that Panelbase have a slightly higher number of really, really committed independence supporters in their panel than some firms, and the buzz around Alba in the independence movement in April 2021 may have explained the high Alba showing in those early days. Now that we’ve had eighteen months for the dust to settle, I certainly wouldn’t take it as a given that Panelbase are still overestimating Alba.

I see that Ipsos UK’s resident identity politics extremist and anti-Alba rent-a-quote Mark McGeoghegan is quoted as saying that a 4% showing for Alba would be unlikely to translate into seats.  And I’m sure this supposedly objective “expert analysis” has nothing whatever to do with the fact that McGeoghegan would have a conniption fit if Alba did actually win seats at Holyrood because he openly loathes the party due to its support for gender critical feminism, and due to his own personal hatred of Alex Salmond.  (And I use the word “hatred” accurately – it’s fully supported by McGeoghegan’s tweet history, which also shows he’s one of the toddlers who “hilariously” insist on mis-spelling Alba’s name as “Abla”.  Impartial polling expert and all that.  He also constantly pushed the narrative that Alba were somehow wholly to blame for the dip in independence support in early 2021, which was self-evidently absurd given that Alba were receiving a hundred times less media coverage than the SNP and Greens.)

The reality is that McGeoghegan can’t be honest enough to admit that we now have a poll which could translate into Alba list seats, because it would drive a coach and horses through the dishonest propaganda he’s been pumping out since the day Alba came into existence.  Here’s the truth he doesn’t want you to know: 4% of the list vote might well be enough for Alba to nick a Scottish Parliament seat.  It would be borderline, but it’s not at all an unlikely outcome.  It’s very improbable that any party’s vote share would be exactly evenly spread across all eight regions, so if Alba were on an average of 4% across the country, the likelihood is that they’d touch 5% or 6% in one or two regions, which could well be enough for a seat.  In past elections, parties have won seats with less than 4% of the national vote – for example, in the inaugural Holyrood election in 1999, the SSP won a seat in Glasgow in spite of taking only 2% of the vote nationally, and the Greens won a seat in Lothians in spite of only having 3.6% of the national vote.

That said, there is still plenty of room for scepticism about whether Alba would win a seat in an election held right now – not because 4% is unlikely to be enough, but simply because Panelbase is the only firm putting Alba as high as 4%.

Where is Alba’s list support coming from?  Almost entirely from the SNP.  The data tables show that of the 32 respondents who would vote Alba, 29 of them voted SNP in the 2019 UK general election.  A full 9% of people who voted SNP in 2019 would now vote Alba on the list.  Alba have by far their highest level of support among over-55s (7%) but there is no gender divide.  Unsurprisingly, country of birth does make a very big difference, with 5% of Scotland-born respondents saying they would vote Alba, compared to less than 1% of England-born respondents.

The National’s piece on the poll has also put the figures for independence and Westminster voting intentions into the public domain, so I’ll just briefly give you those…

Again, I’m only giving you the percentage changes for information, because in fact this poll is not comparable to the previous Panelbase poll, which did not list Alba or even the Greens as options.  That can probably almost entirely explain the seemingly alarming drop in the SNP lead over Labour from 15 points to 12 – which as you can see from the seats projection would have real consequences.  Not only would Labour gain more seats from the SNP, it would also help the Conservatives retain three seats that should really be going to the SNP.  This underscores the very real dangers of the pro-independence vote being split in any election conducted by first-past-the-post, and demonstrates again that it is absolutely essential that there be just one pro-indy candidate per constituency in any Westminster election used as a de facto independence referendum.  

No change here, but remember the previous Panelbase poll was in August, so this is further strong evidence that the media propaganda over the death of the Queen has failed to dent independence support.  So much for The Sun’s fantasies about the Yes vote “plummeting”.  The “silent majority” brigade dreamed their dreams, but for the people of Scotland it’s just business as usual.

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