BOMBSHELL Channel 4 poll suggests the court ruling has riled up the Scottish public so much that *60% or 61%* now say they will vote SNP in 2024 to get Scotland out of the United Kingdom. The Supreme Court justices are the toast of the independence movement this evening.

Excluding Don’t Knows and ‘Prefer Not To Says’, that works out as approximately Yes 60%, No 40%.

That works out as roughly Yes 61%, No 39% without Don’t Knows and Won’t Says.

These are obviously extraordinarily good numbers, which at the very least seem to point to some kind of outright majority for independence in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling.  It’s particularly striking that respondents were not put off by the pejorative wording about “leaving the UK”, which normally dramatically reduces support.  However, these numbers also raise question marks about how polling can be accurately conducted for a plebiscite election, because it’s obviously pretty unlikely that a more conventional voting intention poll would show the SNP as high as 60% or 61%.  It looks like the hypothetical nature of the question, and the failure to name other parties as alternatives, may have produced a distorted outcome – but there’d be a different sort of problem if you just asked a conventional voting intention question, because that might underestimate the SNP vote due to respondents not taking into account the plebiscite element.  It’s really not straightforward.

And another point that occurred to me today: will pollsters actually bother asking for referendum voting intentions anymore, now that we know there isn’t going to be a referendum?  I’ll almost certainly still ask for that question to be put in when I commission the next Scot Goes Pop poll (hopefully in the not too distant future), but I’ll be interested to see what others do.

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