Kalamity Kez in crisis after unsparing YouGov poll confirms Scottish Labour's existence is now pointless

Today's new YouGov poll will come as something of a relief for the SNP, because the fieldwork is bang-up-to-date (it concluded yesterday), and there is no sign at all of the slippage on the list vote reported by TNS last week.  Quite the reverse, in fact.

Constituency ballot :

SNP 50% (+1)
Labour 21% (+2)
Conservatives 18% (-1)
Liberal Democrats 5% (-1)
Greens 3% (-1)
UKIP 2% (-1)

Regional list ballot :

SNP 45% (+2)
Labour 19% (+2)
Conservatives 18% (-1)
Greens 8% (n/c)
Liberal Democrats 5% (n/c)
UKIP 3% (-1)
SSP 1% (n/c)

All the same, today's findings are another reminder of the folly of 'tactical voting' advocates who insist there is some sort of polling consensus that the SNP are running light-years ahead of their showing five years ago.  In fact, YouGov are putting them just 5% ahead of their constituency result from 2011, and just 1% ahead of their 2011 result on the list.

Clearly the Greens' 3% support in the constituencies is up for grabs, because they won't have a candidate in most constituency seats.  Their vote seems to split roughly evenly between Yes and No voters, so the SNP certainly won't be getting all of it, but presumably we'd be safe enough to add on another 1% to the SNP's share.

On the list vote, the Greens will probably have mixed feelings - 8% is healthy enough, but we know that polls have overestimated their strength in previous elections, and there's no sign at all that Patrick Harvie's inclusion in the TV debates has led to any boost (on that point YouGov are in agreement with last week's Survation poll).  They're probably quite unlucky that this is the least competitive Holyrood election to date, because there wasn't the usual sense of excitement over the debates.  People are obviously less likely to have their minds changed by a debate if they're not really paying attention.

This poll is very bad news for RISE, and not just because YouGov are still referring to them as the SSP.  They were offered a rare glimmer of hope last week when TNS became the first firm other than YouGov to put them above 1%.  But if they had really been making progress, you'd have expected their most favourable pollster to put them on at least 2% today, and that hasn't happened.  Having said that, we'll wait and see what the next TNS or Ipsos-Mori poll says - it's not totally impossible that RISE are making modest gains on the ground that only 'real world' polls (telephone or face-to-face) will be able to pick up.

Labour's apparent mini-recovery may not be meaningful, as the the last YouGov poll was particularly bad for them, and the changes are comfortably within the margin of error.  Nevertheless, YouGov have consistently been the most favourable pollster for the Scottish Tories over the last few months, so if the Tories find themselves behind Labour in even this poll, it clearly remains unlikely that Ruth Davidson will replace Kezia Dugdale as leader of the opposition in May (although Dugdale may well be replaced by someone from her own party's ranks).

I don't subscribe to the view that the personal ratings of party leaders are a better guide to the outcome of elections than voting intention figures.  Nevertheless, it's fair to say that Alex Salmond's personal lead over Iain "the Snarl" Gray was a necessary prerequisite for the SNP's dramatic late comeback in 2011.  The fact that Nicola Sturgeon's net rating in today's poll is 50 points better than Kezia Dugdale's, and 28 points better than Ruth Davidson's (amusingly, Willie Rennie wasn't even asked about) doesn't leave the opposition parties with much grounds for hope that the SNP's support could prove soft.  In any case, as late as the turnaround was in 2011, it was already well underway by this stage of the campaign.

There's an absurdly long string of supplementary questions asking whether Kezia Dugdale or Ruth Davidson is better on a range of leadership skills and policy areas.  The results are mixed, but what I find more interesting is why the questions were asked at all.  The poll was commissioned by the Times, so it could be that they're trying to frame this election as primarily a battle for second place, and as a personal duel between Davidson and Dugdale rather than one between the Tories and Labour.  (Presumably they're banking on the Ruth Davidson brand being marginally less despised in Scotland than the Tory brand.)

Someone has asked in the comments section whether the YouGov sample still has far too many people who were born outside Scotland.  The answer is yes, but only in the unweighted sample - YouGov introduced weighting by country of birth during the referendum campaign.  They're also having to downweight Yes voters from the referendum quite sharply, and the same was true of Survation last week.  If by any chance the SNP outperform their standing in online polls, it might be a clue that weighting by recalled referendum vote has its limitations.  OK, there's probably not much danger of people falsely recalling that they voted Yes, but it's not hard to see why a few people might be embarrassed to admit they voted No.  The reason why this point is of interest is that downweighting of Yes voters makes a contribution to the slight No lead that we typically see in online polls at the moment.

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UPDATE : Since I wrote this post, YouGov have quietly revised today's datasets and replaced references to the SSP with "RISE - Scotland's Left Alliance".  It's therefore unclear whether respondents were actually asked about RISE by name.

UPDATE II : Anthony Wells of YouGov has sent me a tweet clarifying that they did ask respondents about RISE by name, but initially forgot to update the template for the datasets, which previously referred to the SSP.

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SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

I didn't have time to update the Poll of Polls last Thursday, so the percentage changes listed below take into account both the YouGov and Survation polls.

Constituency ballot :

SNP 52.2% (-0.2)
Labour 20.4% (+0.6)
Conservatives 16.4% (-0.2)
Liberal Democrats 5.8% (-0.4)

Regional list ballot : 

SNP 46.6% (+0.8)
Labour 19.4% (+0.6)
Conservatives 16.2% (-0.6)
Greens 7.4% (n/c)
Liberal Democrats 6.6% (+0.2)

(The Poll of Polls is based on a rolling average of the most recent poll from each of the firms that have reported Scottish Parliament voting intention numbers over the previous three months, and that adhere to British Polling Council rules. At present, there are five - Panelbase, Survation, YouGov, TNS and Ipsos-Mori. Whenever a new poll is published, it replaces the last poll from the same company in the sample.)

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.