NOTE: Since publishing this piece, a further YouGov has been released, which stated some of the Scoop questions were phrased a bit differently and thus were not directly comparable. I’ve therefore removed the details for this poll from my trackers. However, I believe it is still useful to have these additional polls, and will instead come back soon to re-edit this to compare with the previous Scoop, and in future report as Scoop vs Scoop. (Help I can’t stop saying Scoop)
For the reasons outlined in the introduction to this piece, Ballot Box Scotland was supposed to be on a break from Twitter, focussing primarily on the website and even then running shorter form analysis than usual of polls. Then the First Minister announced she was standing down. As much as I may wish otherwise, it’s not really possible just to disengage entirely when probably the biggest political event in Scotland since the referendum has just taken place. So I’m back-ish, earlier than I’d have liked.
With three polls having dropped on Friday (the 17th of February), that would have been a polling overload at the best of times, never mind when I’m a bit knackered, have a day job, and had social plans for most of the evening. I know I always complain about the relative dearth of Scottish polling but c’mon, a little breathing room would help! Given both my previously stated intention to keep these pieces short and how many polls there are to get through anyway, I’m going to rush pretty quickly through them.
This second poll comes from YouGov (link to tables), as part of the Scottish Election Study’s regular “Scottish Opinion Monitor” or, as it’s more delightfully known, Scoop (link to Scoop explanation). Although they have been running this every four months for over a year now, I’m pretty sure this is the first time they’ve made sure it was a big, shall we say, scoop for the media. It seems like they’ll be making sure to get the basic details out there going forward, which will give us a nice, relatively predictable bit of polling. Be aware though this all (just) predates the First Minister’s resignation.
The previous Scoop (which is not logged on the BBS website, due to time constraints with uploading old data) covered the 22nd – 25th of November 2022. Changes are shown as (vs that poll / vs last election). As the text originally in this piece related to comparing with the previous YouGov, I’ve simply deleted it rather than add new analysis due to time constraints.
Regional Vote
Constituency Vote
Seat Projection
Projecting that into seats might give us something like this:
Please see this page for how projections work and important caveats.
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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