With just a week to go until the General Election, YouGov have very kindly obliged us with another poll that folk can use to frantically lead those last-minute runes. It also includes Holyrood voting intention which is this project’s bread and butter, so if you’re absolutely desperate for the Westminster stuff you’ll need to skip to the end.
Display format;
- Party – Vote% (Change vs last poll by agency / Change vs last election or referendum)
Holyrood Voting Intention and Projection (Tracker)
Regional;
- SNP – 37% (-2)
- Conservative – 25% (+5)
- Labour – 14% (+3)
- Liberal Democrat – 10% (-3)
- Green – 8% (nc)
- SSP – 3% (nc)
- Brexit – 2% (-3)
- UKIP – 0% (-1)
After the last YouGov had the drama of Labour being pushed down to fourth, the (post-2016) norm of Labour in third resumes. Labour are still on one of their lowest polling figures ever, but for now the Lib Dem revival has ebbed a bit. Contrary to some other recent polling the SNP are down a couple of percent as well, whilst the Conservatives continue to re-absorb the Brexit vote. Again, they’ve found that 3% for the SSP and I am just dying to know what odd artefact of methodology is giving that because – with all due respect to the folk in that party – it just isn’t a party that’s in the public consciousness, or that has anything in the way of effective electoral machinery.
Constituency;
- SNP – 46% (+1)
- Conservative – 26% (+3)
- Labour – 14% (+1)
- Liberal Democrat – 11% (-1)
- Green – 1% (-1)
- Brexit – 0% (-3)
Most of the same dynamics at play in the constituency vote – Brexit cannibalised by the Conservatives, Labour up a bit and Lib Dems down, but the SNP go the opposite way with a slight uptick.
Projected into seats it might look like;
- SNP – 62 (-4 / -1)
- Conservative – 32 (+7 / +1)
- Labour – 16 (+4 / -8)
- Liberal Democrat – 10 (-6 / +5)
- Green – 9 (-1 / +3)
- Brexit – 0 (-2 / nc)
That polling boost for both the Conservatives and Labour knocks a handful of seats off the SNP and Greens, but it’s mostly the Lib Dems who’ve lost out versus last time. The Brexit party are also totally back out of the Holyrood game. In terms of the Independence-Union balance it’s still coming out at a Pro-Independence majority larger than the current one.
Finally for Holyrood, let’s do that more proportional system I use as a just for fun illustration of how AMS isn’t entirely proportional (vs AMS projection);
- SNP – 51 (-11)
- Conservative – 34 (+2)
- Labour – 19 (+3)
- Liberal Democrat – 13 (+3)
- Green – 11 (+2)
- SSP – 1 (+1)
There’s no pro-Independence majority when things are more accurately proportional, and again that bizarre 3% for the SSP has my model give them a seat in Glasgow.
Westminster Voting Intention (Tracker)
- SNP – 44% (+2)
- Conservative – 28% (+6)
- Labour – 15% (+3)
- Liberal Democrat – 12% (-1)
- Green – 1% (-3)
- Brexit – 0% (-6)
Note that changes here are vs the 23rd-25th of October, when YouGov did a series of polls in each of the UK’s nations and regions.
The Westminster figures are obviously the main story out of this poll with the General Election next week, and it shows the three largest parties gaining votes at the expense of the smaller. However, versus 2017, only the SNP and Lib Dems look set to actually increase their vote. The Conservatives fall very slightly short of their performance last time, but they basically look to have picked all of the Brexit vote back up – remember that this poll asked people about candidates in their constituency, and Brexit are only on the ballot in a quarter of them.
Labour meanwhile are on track for an absolutely catastrophic result. In many respects this campaign has, at the GB level, been a repeat of 2017, with a huge Con-Lab gap at the start which has narrowed substantially as polling day approaches as the smaller parties shed votes. Looking just at Scotland, however, the three recent polls at roughly the equivalent point of the 2017 campaign were 25%, 25% and 20%. This time around it’s 20%, 16% and 15%. If you pop over to the GE19 Hub you’ll see that Labour’s average over the last 5 polls is pretty flat, versus Conservative and SNP increases. The gap may be closing down south, but it isn’t in Scotland.
Regular readers will know that I don’t do Westminster projections because FPTP alone is quite volatile (amongst other reasons), but me being me I have finally done a version of my PR system applied to Westminster. That comes out at (changes vs seat projection provided by The Times as part of poll / vs 2017 reworked to PR);
- SNP – 26 (-20 / +4)
- Conservative – 17 (+9 / nc)
- Labour – 9 (+8 / -7)
- Liberal Democrat – 7 (+3 / +3)
As you’d expect, the SNP’s massive over-representation simply would exist under PR, with the other three Westminster parties gaining enormously. First Past the Post really is an outrageous system, if we could just hurry up and abolish it that’d be wonderful.
