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 second of our three recent polls, chronologically, was from the usual partnership of the Sunday Times and Norstat (link to tables). This was the first to be published and I was almost going to split the Party Profile schedule in half to cover it, but it took Norstat four days to get the tables up, by which point we’d already had the Ipsos come out. Typical!
The previous Norstat covered the 10th – 13th 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!
Very little movement in this poll for the top four parties at the last election, though given Norstat’s history as the worst Green pollster, margin of error or not they’ll be happy to see themselves back at the joint-highest that firm have ever had them on. The Greens tend to underperform against their polling average, not against every single poll taken, and if this is what their least favourable pollster says they have reason to be confident.
The more substantial movement is for the Lib Dems and Reform, both brushing up against that margin. For the Lib Dems this does a lot to boost their average, both being at the top end of current polling and making their new current worst 8% rather than 7%. For Reform, this would be a big chunk out of their vote, and may be another indicator that my long-held theory about their support slipping by polling day is accurate.
One little aside here: although it’s not massively so, the “Others” tally here is higher than average. Norstat were until now well known for being the most favourable pollster for Alba. Given Alba appear broken out in the tables for Westminster but not for Holyrood, I have a cheeky little theory that they did prompt for Alba, remembered or realised afterwards they’d been de-registered, and then folded the numbers into “Others”. This would also explain the extremely long time taken to publish the tables, even by Norstat’s glacial standards.
Constituency Vote
Change vs Last Poll
Change vs 2021
Margin of error warning!
It speaks to how absolutely dire Scottish Labour’s circumstances are that this poll was one they were spinning as a really good one for them. Their vote went up! Reform’s went down! And certainly, that’s better to see than the opposite. The problems here are threefold. One, obviously, 2% is well within margin of error, even if Reform’s own -4% is more substantial. Two, they’re still 15% behind the SNP on the raw figures. Three, this is the highest Green constituency share of the bunch, and the Greens are not standing in most constituencies.
If we howk the Greens out of most constituencies, their re-projected constituency share is just 2%, with the SNP going up to 38%, Labour to 20% and the Lib Dems to 11%. In other words, that adds 3% to the SNP’s advantage over Labour. If anything that might be an underestimate; the 3:1 ratio for Green voter movement is based on 2022 transfer patterns. It’s entirely possible and in fact quite likely that the current Green voter base is even less Labour favourable.
Seat Projection
Projecting that into seats might give us something like this:
Please see this page for how projections work and important caveats.
The challenge facing Labour is pretty evident from this projection. Even in what they tried to sell to everyone as a good poll for them, my model says they gain one measly constituency from the SNP. That’s better than nothing, but it’s not opening the door to Bute House, and it says a lot that the absolute best case my model spits out for Labour at the moment is still their smallest MSP group in Holyrood’s history. As with all other recent polling, the SNP remain close to a majority, and can easily attain one with either Green or Lib Dem support on any bill or budget.
Note that if you spotted the initially reported version of this on Bluesky, you may pick up on a slight difference in the seat projection. I located a relatively minor error in my model relating to the distribution of Reform’s constituency vote. The knock on effect in this poll was to tip Aberdeenshire West from SNP to Conservative, which meant Reform getting an extra seat. This is a great example of how when you’ve got a party over-representation, a constituency win doesn’t necessary lead to a 1:1 trade: the Conservatives won the constituency, but all that did was turn one of their list seats into a Reform seat!
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
No margin of error warning here because whilst most movement is indeed within that margin, the one that isn’t is massive. Seven points off the Reform share versus the last poll! Now in fairness that last poll was a joint-highest share ever for Reform in Scotland so this may partly be coming back down to earth after an outlier finding, but that’s still huge and suggests Reform’s appeal may be waning. That shouldn’t be a surprise as GB-wide polling has seen a fair dip lately.
That is not at all to Labour’s benefit however really, with only a statistically meaningless single point gain. They are still on roughly half what they got in 2024, and 14% behind the SNP. I would expect the Greens to put up a full Westminster slate next time unless they are feeling particularly stupid, so there’s less scope for SNP shoring up here, but this is still the kind of lead that would hand them back most of their 2024 losses.
Change vs Last Poll
Change vs 2014
Margin of error warning!
An absolutely sublime bit of decimal point based movement here: the headline figures haven’t changed, and yet there’s a notional one point swing to Independence after excluding Don’t Knows. In other words, meaningless, a statistical tie still in place, don’t read anything into it, Norstat continue their recent trend of very slightly Independence-favourable polling is all.
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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