With less than a month to go until polling day, a new Survation poll has just been released placing Labour an eye-watering THIRTY-ONE points behind the SNP on the constituency ballot.
Constituency ballot :
SNP 52% (-2)
Labour 21% (+1)
Conservatives 16% (n/c)
Liberal Democrats 6% (-1)
Regional list ballot :
SNP 44% (+2)
Labour 19% (+1)
Conservatives 16% (-2)
Greens 10% (n/c)
Liberal Democrats 6% (n/c)
UKIP 4% (-1)
The Greens are making a valiant attempt to spin these numbers as some kind of amazing breakthrough for them, but if anything, I suspect they may be privately disappointed. We know that there are very serious question marks over the way Survation pose the list ballot question - at least two eminent academics have suggested that this flaw may well lead to the SNP list vote being underestimated, and to the Green and UKIP list vote being significantly overestimated. If that's right, what matters is not the raw Green vote reported by Survation, but the trend. As you can see, the Greens have seemingly failed to gain any boost from the early part of official campaigning, while the SNP list vote has actually crept back up again (albeit not by a statistically significant amount). That flatly contradicts the trend seen in this week's TNS poll, which reported a sharp drop in the SNP's list vote - albeit the Greens were only getting a limited benefit from that. The chances that the TNS findings were a bit freakish have therefore increased, but we'll still have to wait and see what the Survation fieldwork dates were before reaching any firm conclusions. Unusually, today's poll was commissioned by a trade union, and I wouldn't be totally surprised if that means it's been held back for a little while. (UPDATE : Just found the fieldwork dates - the poll started on March 23rd and finished on April 3rd. So in a sense it's reasonably up to date, although the very earliest interviews are more than two weeks old.)
Explanatory note : As a fond tribute to the mainstream media's restrained take on the GERS report, Scot Goes Pop headlines will contain 50% bonus hysteria for an indefinite period.
0 Comments