How are SNP voters from 2019 planning to vote now?

There are some curious comments from Professor John Curtice quoted in The National today. As a commenter on the previous thread wryly put it, Curtice “argues both for and against the narrative that the SNP is losing voters straight to Labour”. Understandably, The National have chosen to headline the part where he argues against that narrative and states that Labour’s gains in Scotland can be traced back to the Trussmageddon period. But I think that’s going to lead to people getting the false impression that Labour have only been gaining votes from the Tories, whereas in fact Curtice points out himself that a substantial number of SNP voters from 2019 have switched to Labour. I would guess what he really means is that the Trussmageddon generated so much momentum behind Labour in England that it started to affect the SNP v Labour battle in Scotland, and some voters who would otherwise have stuck with the SNP started moving across to Labour.

There are two facts that are fairly undeniable in all this –

1) The SNP are currently polling around ten percentage points lower on average than the vote share they received at the 2019 general election. Self-evidently, such a drop doesn’t happen as a result of Tory voters switching to Labour. The only way it can happen is if SNP voters switch to other parties and/or move to the undecided column.

2) Many polls show that the extra voters Labour have picked up since 2019 have come more from the SNP than from unionist parties. For example, in this week’s Redfield & Wilton poll, the composition of Labour’s current support is as follows –

Only 49.6% actually voted Labour in 2019

27.1% voted SNP in 2019

9.3% voted Conservative in 2019

4.7% voted Liberal Democrat in 2019

0.4% voted Green in 2019

8.9% did not vote in 2019 (this probably includes people who were not eligible to vote because they were under 18 at the time)

So of the votes that have gone to Labour from other parties, the lion’s share has come from the SNP – although admittedly the Ipsos poll showed a somewhat different pattern.

Or we can also look at this the other way round, and see what Redfield & Wilton are saying has happened to SNP voters from 2019. These numbers are not directly comparable with the ones above, because undecideds haven’t been stripped out.

How SNP voters from 2019 are planning to vote now:

SNP 61%

Labour 20%

Don’t Know 9%

Liberal Democrats 3%

Greens 2%

Reform UK 2%

Alba 1%

Conservatives 1%

Won’t Vote 1%

One thing that leaps out here is that Don’t Knows reverting to their previous party between now and the election are unlikely to be a get-out-of-jail-free card for the SNP. Although the 9% of SNP voters from 2019 who are now undecided are greater in number than the 4% of Labour voters from 2019 who are undecided, that gap is not big enough to plausibly make a transformative difference.

It’s tempting to say on these numbers that Labour are the SNP’s only real problem, but in fact almost one-third of SNP voters who have switched to other parties have gone to parties other than Labour – it’s just that this one-third are spread around fairly evenly. Only a small number have gone to Alba, and as I’ve said before, if Alba are going to justify to the independence movement their decision to make a significant intervention in a first-past-the-post election, they need to start demonstrating that they’re picking up substantial numbers of disgruntled former SNP voters who would otherwise be going to Labour or abstaining. If it instead looks like Alba are just taking a very small percentage of people who would otherwise vote SNP, that’s not going to look like a constructive intervention at all.

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