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 third of our three recent polls, chronologically, came from YouGov (link to original writeup). This was via the fancy “Multilevel Regression and Post-Stratification” approach, rather than just bog-standard opinion polling. This means it also comes with YouGov’s own estimate for results in each constituency and region. I remain sceptical that for all their cleverness MRPs are, actually, any more informative or accurate than more simple projection methods such as those I use on BBS. In any case, we can nonetheless use their vote shares to drive a normal projection and compare.
As this was MRP polling, it’s not comparable to YouGov’s normal series, and only featured Holyrood data. Changes are therefore simply shown as vs 2021.
Regional Vote
Change vs Last Poll
Change vs 2021
As we’re only comparing with 2021, there’s a lot of movement here. Basically if you were one of the top three parties in 2021, this poll is bad news for you. If you were the other three, this is great news. For the SNP this is their joint-highest in the current average, so although it’s unlikely to lead to any list seats, that’ll add to their confidence. For both Labour and the Conservatives however this is their worst share currently in the average, and for the Conservatives, the worst of any poll I’ve tracked this term.
The counterbalance to that Conservative low is that this is the highest Reform share in the recent crop of polls. It’s interesting that given other pollsters have found a drop-off or plateauing of Reform support that YouGov are still towards the upper end; I remain rather perplexed by the idea that what has generally been Reform’s lowest pollster GB-wide has it right being at the upper end for Scotland.
Green and Lib Dem figures are less remarkable. The Greens are precisely on their average in this one, and although it’s on the upper end for the Lib Dems, they have a very narrow range from 8-10% anyway.
Constituency Vote
Change vs Last Poll
Change vs 2021
The constituency figures may look remarkable in the sense that this is the first SNP share above 40% in a BBS-tracked poll since September 2023. However, this is also the first poll to account for the fact the Greens are only standing in 6 of 73 constituencies, which substantially boosts the SNP’s share. The previous two YouGov polls (one for Scoop and one normal) were 11% and 9% Green on this vote respectively, so it’s eminently plausible to end up with this level of SNP support. Indeed, 2% is what my already Green-excluding model was spitting out for recent polling, which is reassuring.
As with the list vote, this has Reform stronger than their recent average and the Conservatives much lower, so I do wonder if the reality might be to shuffle a couple of points back between them. Labour though are sitting pretty much where their average is, which remains “far too far behind the SNP to have any hope whatsoever of leading even a desperate, fractured government of all the Pro-Union parties.”
Seat Projection
Projecting that into seats might give us something like this:
Please see this page for how projections work and important caveats.
The fact my model was already Green-excluding in most seats means the BBS projection isn’t actually very different to other recent polling. The standout element of this to me is somewhat funny, in that this is the only poll I can recall where, thanks to their absolutely dire share, the Conservatives lose Ettrick, Roxburgh and Berwickshire to the SNP. YouGov themselves think the Conservatives will hold it, making this the only seat my model is more positive about the SNP’s prospects in.
Overall though what YouGov’s MRP process marks out as a small SNP majority, my model still flags up as one seat short. Crucially though there are some very, very close races in that. Banffshire and Buchan Coast for example has Reform less than 1% ahead, and the two stronghold Labour seats that YouGov thinks wave goodbye are within 5%. In other words, and in fairness this applies across a lot of recent polling, a majority is well within the realms of possibility if the inevitable difference between model and reality lands just the right way for the SNP.
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
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.
If you find this or other Ballot Box Scotland output useful and/or interesting, and you can afford to do so, please consider donating to support my work. I love doing this, but it’s a one-man project and takes a lot of time and effort. All donations, no matter how small, are greatly appreciated and extremely helpful.
(About Donations)
