As the 2026 Scottish Parliament election approaches, keep up to date with all the latest polling and analysis on Ballot Box Scotland’s Holyrood Hub page!
Poll Details and Context
After a shockingly long period without much polling that Survation finally broke the other week, we had a trio of polls out this week. As I was in the middle of the Party Profile series, was quite busy this week, and the first published, but not first completed, poll took ages for tables to release, I’m a bit behind on these poll analysis pieces.
The first of our three recent polls, chronologically, was from the usual partnership of STV (link to original writeup) and Ipsos (link to tables). Speaking of usual partnerships, I was also on Scotland Tonight (link to episode, available for a few weeks) to talk about this poll as well!
The previous Ipsos covered the 19th- 26th of February 2026. Changes are shown as (vs that poll / vs last election).
Regional Vote
Change vs Last Poll
Change vs 2021
Margin of error warning!
I’ve got the warning there, but the big change here is actually at the level it should be taken seriously: a big dip for Labour. They’ve lost a chunk of their vote against what had been a relatively positive figure by recent standards in the previous poll. Although it amounts to a statistical four way tie for second place, on the headline figures Labour end up in fourth, behind Reform and the Greens in joint second.
For the Greens, that’s steady on the last poll, and continues the Ipsos trend of finding the highest Green shares. Given most other recent polls have been above 10% though, they can nonetheless be quietly confident of a good result. For Reform, although this represents an uptick of two points from the previous poll, it’s still below their recent average. The Conservatives are also up a couple of points which could be noise, but they’d really benefit from that extra padding.
Constituency Vote
Change vs Last Poll
Change vs 2021
Margin of error warning!
Over on the constituency vote, Labour’s losses actually go beyond the margin of error, emphasising how dire this poll is for them. Tying with Reform on 15%, both place an eye-watering 24% behind the SNP. Ipsos did have a past tendency towards high SNP shares, so perhaps that’s back in play here? Note the Conservatives are also up versus the last poll, where they’d slipped into single digits.
The Greens are unchanged but be aware that by the time this poll was published nominations had closed and we had confirmation they were only standing in 6 of 73 constituencies. Thankfully the Ballot Box Scotland model has always been prepared for that, and indeed assumed their absence in most seats before now anyway. Re-distribution of the Green vote leaves them with around 2%, takes the SNP to 42% and Labour to 16%.
Seat Projection
Projecting that into seats might give us something like this:
Please see this page for how projections work and important caveats.
Despite the SNP’s enhanced constituency vote lead, this still doesn’t quite come out at a majority. However, a few of the non-SNP constituencies are on absolute knife edges, meaning it’s easy to see a majority from these figures. Most notably I remain of the view that Southside is a possible 2031 gain for the Greens rather than this year, even though I’ve heard on the grapevine the local SNP campaign are slightly rattled.
Regardless of the SNP’s exact share, the most remarkable thing here is probably the fact the Greens end up second in seats. That has never happened before. This is an outlier in my view, given Ipsos tend towards those high Green shares, but it adds to a sense at this stage in the campaign that if any parties have momentum, it’s the SNP and Greens, and not Labour or Reform.
Possible Majorities
Note: these majorities relate simply to passing a vote in the Scottish Parliament. They do not imply the formation of a full coalition government.
- Traffic Light: Labour, Lib Dem and Green
- Independence Bloc: SNP, Green and Alba
- Grand Coalition: SNP and Labour
- Union Bloc: Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem and Reform UK
Change vs Last Poll
Change vs 2024
I’ve not got the margin of error warning here because the two biggest figures here are outside it. Labour are again down a whopping 5 points, making this poll overall a complete and utter disaster for them. The additional 4% on the SNP’s figure makes this their best Westminster figure since the election.
Everything else here absolutely is within margin of error, though it’s not uncommon to see the Greens squeaking ahead of the Lib Dems in what has become a clear statistical tie between the two. Unlike Holyrood, at the next election I would expect if the Scottish Greens have any sense at all they’d put forward their first ever full constituency slate.
Change vs Last Poll
Change vs 2014
Margin of error warning!
No movement of statistical note here, though what we have is to the Union’s benefit. That does make this the first Ipsos in quite some time where the Union is ahead of Independence, but it remains in tossup territory.
Hypotheticals
As ever, the last little bit of analysis concerns those hypothetical and more proportional voting systems that BBS likes to play about with. The use of pure FPTP at Westminster is an affront to democracy, and though Holyrood fares far better, AMS is still deeply imperfect. The examples here simply transpose the poll findings onto more proportional voting systems – the reality is that different systems would of course result in different voter behaviour.
Scandinavian Style Westminster
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