EXCLUSIVE SCOT GOES POP / FIND OUT NOW POLL: A significant majority of voters in Scotland would vote Yes to independence in a new referendum held now

As promised for the video-phobic amongst you (although do watch the video version if you're not video-phobic!), here are the independence results in text form from the new Scot Goes Pop poll I commissioned last week.  The polling firm that conducted the poll was Find Out Now, who are a member of the British Polling Council and abide by that organisation's rules.  They're also a member of the Market Research Society.  The sample consists of 1002 respondents who were interviewed between 15th and 20th April, in other words between Wednesday of last week and yesterday.  

Scot Goes Pop / Find Out Now poll

If another Scottish independence referendum was held tomorrow, with the question 'Should Scotland be an independent country?', how would you vote?

Yes 53% (-) 

No 47% (-)

Those numbers, which exclude Don't Knows, are unchanged from the most recent comparable Find Out Now poll, which was commissioned by The National in February.  However, on the figures which leave Don't Knows in, there is a small increase in the Yes lead:

Yes 50% (-)

No 44% (-1)

Undecided 6% (+1)

The results have been weighted by age, gender, region and recalled 2024 general election vote - but not, crucially, by 2014 referendum recalled vote, which after this length of time carries with it the risk of false recall.  (Find Out Now's methodology is absolutely consistent regardless of client, let me stress - these results would have been exactly the same if the poll had been commissioned by the Daily Express.)

In my view, what is most significant about these results is that they are bang up to date and are taken from fieldwork right in the middle of an election campaign, because we know from past experience that independence support sometimes dips during elections, even when the SNP's own vote holds up.  That's probably because unionist parties devote so much of their campaigning to attacks on the subject without the SNP necessarily responding in kind.  But on the evidence of this poll, it's not a problem on this occasion.

Across the whole polling industry, there have now been fifteen independence polls in 2026 so far.  Nine of them have shown a Yes lead, only four have shown a No lead, and the remaining two were dead heats.  No fewer than *six* different polling firms have shown a pro-independence majority at some point this year: Find Out Now, Ipsos, Savanta, Stonehaven, Norstat and More In Common (although I must admit I hadn't previously been aware of the Savanta poll until I checked the list just now - I'll have to look into it).

There is no gender gap in the Find Out Now poll other than the fact that women are slightly more likely to be undecided: they break 49% to 43% for Yes, while among men the Yes lead is 51% to 45%.  As ever, there is an enormous gulf between the youngest and oldest respondents, although in this case the best age bracket for Yes is thirtysomethings.  30-39 year olds break 68% to 27% for Yes.  The best age group for No is 65-74 year olds, who break 69% to 26% for No.  The youngest age group to be pro-No is 55-64 year olds.  

Among people who voted for unionist parties in the 2024 UK general election, there is considerable minority support for independence (except among Tory voters who are almost monolithically No).  26% of Labour voters, 21% of Liberal Democrat voters, and 20% of Reform UK voters would back Yes in a new referendum.  In a way that's a bad thing, though, because we want all independence supporters to be voting for pro-independence parties - we don't want then cross-voting for unionist parties.

The settled will klaxon is sounding tonight, and I can tell you that KC has already heard it loud and clear.  There's plenty more to come from this poll, including the Holyrood numbers, which as I said in the video contain a really quite stunning result in one particular respect - and the more I've checked it and compared it to previous polls, the more extraordinary it looks.  

So keep an eye out for more results over the coming days, and in the meantime please check out the new Scot Goes Pop polling fundraiser - if you have a few pounds to spare it would be very much appreciated.

Be the first to discover the INDEPENDENCE RESULTS from the exclusive new Scot Goes Pop opinion poll: join me at 9pm on YouTube for the release

As far as I know, if you join the waiting zone, the video above should automatically start playing at 9pm, although you may have to endure a two-minute countdown clock.  If nothing appears after a minute or two, try refreshing.

For those of you who are totally video-phobic, don't worry: I'll also post the results in text form on the blog, but later in the evening.

In the meantime, please check out the new Scot Goes Pop polling fundraiser, and if you feel able to chip in a few pounds, that would be very much appreciated.

This is not a drill: the independence results from the new Scot Goes Pop poll will be released TONIGHT

 

I'll post the link to the video revealing the results once I've scheduled it.  (I'm trying to build up some suspense and anticipation here, but doubtless that's a forlorn hope.) 

Don't forget the new Scot Goes Pop polling fundraiser I've set up, if you'd like to chip in with a few pounds - it can be found HERE.

My latest constituency profile for The National is Midlothian North.

A heads-up: a new Scot Goes Pop-commissioned opinion poll will be published before election day

So a small announcement - I have commissioned Scot Goes Pop's first opinion poll since the two that were done back-to-back during the SNP leadership election in early 2023.  For cost reasons, it's not going to be the sort of all-singing, all-dancing poll I used to commission back in the day with eight, nine or ten questions - it'll be a bit smaller-scale than that, but I've chosen the questions for maximum impact and I don't think you'll be disappointed by them.

The reason I stopped commissioning polls was because the fundraising efforts ran out of steam, and I had to start concentrating more on general fundraising for the blog if I was going to stay afloat at all.  However, it's been three years since the last poll, and it'll potentially be another three years until the next major election takes place in Scotland, so I don't think there's much doubt that if I'm going to do another one at any point, now is the moment to do it.  It'll be a few days at least before the results are ready, but I thought I'd make an advance announcement to help with the publicising of my new polling fundraiser, which I hope will not only assist with the costs of the current poll, but if we're really lucky potentially also build up a small war-chest for a future poll at a moment of maximum impact.

Here is the pitch I've written for the fundraiser on the GoFundMe page - 

Hi there, my name is James Kelly, and I write the pro-independence Scot Goes Pop blog, which spends much of its time covering opinion polls.

Polls can shape much of the narrative of any election campaign, and that leaves us with a problem in Scotland because most polls are commissioned by unionist media clients. The media don't, of course, decide the results of those polls, but they do decide which issues are and aren't worth asking about, and also what emphasis each result should be given at the time of publication. It's become increasingly frequent over the last couple of years, for example, for the results on the standard Yes/No question about Scottish independence to be totally buried in the reporting - and doubtless it's just an astounding coincidence that this has happened at precisely the moment that Yes has moved into a clear lead in the polling average.

Between 2020 and 2023, I was fortunate enough to be able to offer a corrective to this problem on my website Scot Goes Pop. Roughly every four months during that period, I was able to commission a poll from a variety of reputable polling firms affiliated to the British Polling Council, and to ask the questions that we in the independence movement wanted asked, not the ones that unionist journalists and politicians wanted asked. It wasn't easy, because polls are very expensive, but I was able to do it with your help.

Some of those polls were genuine landmarks. Remember that extraordinary period between mid-2020 and early 2021 when every single independence poll showed a Yes majority? The very first poll in that unbroken sequence was a Panelbase poll commissioned by Scot Goes Pop in June 2020. A few months later, another Scot Goes Pop-commissioned poll showed the largest Yes lead in any Panelbase poll ever. Supplementary results from the polls showed, among other things, that voters want Scotland to join the international treaty banning nuclear weapons, and think it would be appropriate to use a scheduled election to seek a mandate for independence if the option of a referendum is closed off.

I haven't commissioned a poll for three years because the fundraising efforts ran out of steam. However, if there was ever going to be a moment to have a new poll, that moment is right now - we're in the middle of a crucial election campaign, and there potentially won't be another major election for three years. I've therefore taken the bull by the horns and commissioned a new poll.

I'd like to ask for your help, not only in funding this new poll, but potentially raising enough to run another poll in the future at a moment of maximum impact. So if you have £10 or £20 to spare, this could be a really good-value-for-money, high-impact way of positively influencing the political narrative in Scotland. Many thanks in advance to anyone who chooses to contribute.

Click here if you'd like to donate.

If you don't want to donate by card on the fundraiser page, there are two other options available.  Direct PayPal donations can be made to my PayPal email account, which is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

If you want to distinguish the donation from the general fundraising for Scot Goes Pop, just add a note saying "for the poll" or whatever.

Bank transfers are the other possibility.  If you'd like to do that, contact me for the details at my contact email address, which is:  icehouse.250@gmail.com

You now have less than 30 hours to ensure all the independence supporters in your life are registered to vote

In a sense the title says it all, but it perhaps doesn't quite capture the scale of the problem, because data from 2023 suggests 20% of the adult population of Scotland are either not registered to vote at all or are not registered at their current address.  Presumably people in the latter category might theoretically be able to vote in some cases but would be much less likely to.  So if you can persuade the independence supporters in your life to get registered by the deadline of 11.59 tomorrow night (the 20th), that really is half the battle.  Pay particular attention to 16 and 17 year olds, because the 2023 figures suggest *40%* of them were unregistered.

Remember that, as long as people are resident in Scotland, there are very few obstacles to be eligible to vote in a Scottish Parliament or local council election.  It's no longer necessary to be a citizen of a Commonwealth country - that rule was changed a few years ago, so Americans, Chinese people, etc, etc can all register to vote by tomorrow night as long as they are resident here.  The main group that is still partly excluded is prisoners, but several categories of prisoner can apparently vote - remand prisoners, civil prisoners, convicted but unsentenced criminals, prisoners sentenced for non-payment of a fine, prisoners sentenced for contempt of court, and convicted prisoners serving a term of less than 12 months.

The registration process is apparently fairly quick, although don't leave it until the absolute last minute.  The online form can be found HERE.

List seat BONANZA forecast by MRP poll as JL Partners suggest the SNP are on course for an overall majority with the help of TEN LIST SEATS

I feel like I should say something about the new JL Partners / Telegraph MRP poll for the Holyrood election, but I'm actually struggling to find much information about it.  JL Partners' own website only seems to have data for the parallel polls on the English local elections and the Welsh Senedd, and even the Telegraph's write-up doesn't reveal the full seat tallies or vote shares.  The National have once again published the full constituency-level results in an interactive feature, but I'm unable to use it at the moment.

However, what is clear is that this poll is an extreme oddity because it purports to show the one outcome that most of us have ruled out as a realistic possibility.  It may cause the controversial Somerset-based blogger known as "Stew" to have something of an emotional moment, because it shows that the SNP would win an overall majority but only due to a substantial contribution of list seats.  They would take only 57 constituency seats, but their TEN list seats - that's TEN - would drag them up to 67 in total.  It's hard to see how that can be the case unless JL Partners have found one of two things: either a) a massive recovery on the SNP list vote share, or b) a very weird split on the list vote among the SNP's opponents.

One thing I am able to see on The National's website is the map of constituency results, and it's obvious JL Partners are showing a radically different pattern from the MRP polls of Find Out Now or YouGov.  They have Labour winning eight constituencies in the central belt (but weirdly Dumbarton is not one of them).  They have Reform UK winning three seats: Dumfriesshire, Aberdeenshire West and one in the central belt that is hard to discern from the map but to me looks suspiciously like Strathkelvin & Bearsden.  If I'm right about that, it's a completely bonkers projection that should call into question the credibility of the whole poll.  I see on Twitter that someone is also pointing out that the Green vote in Dumfriesshire exceeds Reform's lead over the SNP - and there is no Green candidate in Dumfriesshire!

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My latest constituency profiles for The National are Inverclyde and Inverness & Nairn.

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If you are enjoying Scot Goes Pop's election coverage so much that you start to feel an inexplicable urge to buy me a hot chocolate or a ham-and-cheese toastie, donations are very welcome.  There are three main options: 
a) you can donate by card HERE 
b) you can make a direct PayPal donation to my PayPal email address, which is: jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk
c) you can make a donation by bank transfer - for the necessary details, please drop me a line at my contact email address, which is: icehouse.250@gmail.com

*  *  * 

Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

The question that Anas Sarwar now needs to answer

The Scottish Labour party and its allies, including Paul Hutcheon of the Daily Record and Professor James Mitchell (who is increasingly dropping the pretence of being anything other than a Labour propagandist), have today been doubling down on the idea - which I don't think anyone in their heart of hearts truly believes - that Malcolm Offord's claim that Anas Sarwar approached him about a post-election deal is an outright lie.  That is very hard to square with an article in the Scotsman from only two weeks ago in which a Labour source was saying that Sarwar wanted to form a government from second place with the help of Reform MSPs.

If Sarwar wants his denial to have any credibility, particularly his pious suggestion that it is somehow unimaginable that a decent man like himself would have anything to do with a monster like Offord, it will surely now be necessary for him to explicitly rule out forming a minority government with the votes of Reform MSPs.  It's no longer good enough for him to say, as he and others have done in the past, that he cannot control how Reform MSPs vote in the election for First Minister, and that it is fine for him to simply accept the result of that vote.  He must definitively rule out serving as First Minister on that basis, because irrespective of whether there is a Labour-Reform deal written down on paper, a Labour minority government arithmetically dependent on Reform votes to sustain itself will be a Labour government beholden to the politics of Reform.

The distinction between the Labour spin machine and the Daily Record seems to have broken down again. Funny how that always seems to happen at this stage of the electoral cycle. https://t.co/e6cS1IVOl1

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 15, 2026

Professor Mitchell is getting beyond parody. What matters is whether Offord's claim is *true*. It can be as "appalling" or "illogical" as you like, but if it's "true*, the issue here is Sarwar, not the SNP or anyone else. https://t.co/M7pV0nUneQ

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 15, 2026

Reading between the lines here, what Professor Mitchell is saying is that it was totally fine for Sarwar to informally approach a far-right party for a deal, and the only problem is that others broke the "rules" by letting the public in on his secret. Just not cricket, old boy! https://t.co/apjOS2hhQX

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) April 15, 2026

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My latest constituency profile for The National is Hamilton, Larkhall & Stonehouse.

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If you are enjoying Scot Goes Pop's election coverage so much that you start to feel an inexplicable urge to buy me a hot chocolate or a ham-and-cheese toastie, donations are very welcome.  There are three main options: 
a) you can donate by card HERE 
b) you can make a direct PayPal donation to my PayPal email address, which is: jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk
c) you can make a donation by bank transfer - for the necessary details, please drop me a line at my contact email address, which is: icehouse.250@gmail.com

*  *  * 

Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

In an analogue age Anas Sarwar might have got away with that - but this is a digital age, and he didn't

I forgot all about the Channel 4 leaders' debate, so I didn't watch it live, but obviously I soon heard of Offord's revelation about Anas Sarwar approaching him about a post-election deal to keep out the SNP, so I've just watched it back online.  What absolutely stunned me when I reached the crucial moment was that Krishnan Guru-Murthy, who in other ways was a reasonably good moderator, seemed completely oblivious to the significance of what had just happened.  I would have expected him to laser straight in and ask for as much clarification and detail of the Sarwar-Offord conversation as possible, and then to demand that Sarwar either confirm or deny those details.  Instead he allowed the debate to instantly move on. 

You could see John Swinney patiently biding his time for several minutes and waiting for his turn to speak so he could bring the subject back up, but when Sarwar then did the Sarwar thing of dealing with a moment of maximum danger by drowning it out with a wall of noise, Guru-Murthy passively allowed him to do that and then hurriedly wrapped the segment up before Swinney had a chance to say anything more.  It was absolutely bizarre.  In other circumstances we might have put it down to a London-based presenter not understanding the nuances of Scottish political debate, but I wouldn't have thought any journalist anywhere in the UK should have any difficulty understanding why proposing a deal with Reform is taboo.  I suspect he'll be kicking himself now.

I was reminded tonight of why I was so convinced that Scottish Labour had taken leave of its senses when it first chose Anas Sarwar as its leader, in spite of him being the media's darling.  Prior to then I had always regarded him as an utterly atrocious politician, and the main reason for that was my recollection of his performance in the televised indyref debates, including in particular a head-to-head on STV with Nicola Sturgeon in which he simply refused to let her speak.  Every time she opened her mouth, he shouted over her with a stream of utter drivel about anything and everything, including even the pandas at Edinburgh Zoo.  I suppose in some ways that's quite an effective defensive tactic, because if you literally prevent the audience at home from hearing anything your opponent says, it stops any attack lines against you from hitting home.  But the problem is that you can't do that without the audience concluding you're an ill-mannered buffoon.  He was straight back to that problem tonight.  I'm sure he thought it was a wizard idea to try to prevent Swinney taking advantage of Offord's revelation by screaming "HOW DARE YOU JOHN THIS MAN WANTS TO DEPORT MY CHILDREN THIS IS A MORAL ISSUE HOW DARE YOU JOHN DON'T YOU DARE JOHN", but most viewers will just have been thinking: well, if this is a moral issue, and if Offord wants to deport people's children, why on earth did you ask him to do a deal with you?  Doesn't that, in fact, make you rather immoral and cynical and opportunistic and unprincipled?

In another age the Sarwar noise-fest and Guru-Murthy's lapse might have meant that Offord's comment would have got lost, but instead none of that mattered because the clip was soon all over social media and is now dominating the headlines.  One thing is for sure: any slim chance of Sarwar becoming First Minister by a back door route has just become even slimmer, because if any chance emerges of him getting into Bute House with the votes of Reform MSPs, his antics tonight will be played back on a loop and he'll lose all credibility.

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If you are enjoying Scot Goes Pop's election coverage so much that you start to feel an inexplicable urge to buy me a hot chocolate or a ham-and-cheese toastie, donations are very welcome.  There are three main options: 
a) you can donate by card HERE 
b) you can make a direct PayPal donation to my PayPal email address, which is: jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk
c) you can make a donation by bank transfer - for the necessary details, please drop me a line at my contact email address, which is: icehouse.250@gmail.com

*  *  * 

Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

The Greens have now been crowned the undisputed Olympic champions of misleading bar charts on election leaflets - they're bizarrely claiming that SNP-held Edinburgh Central is a two-horse race between themselves and Labour, and their source for this improbable claim is (drumroll, please) *themselves*. So brazen it deserves a reward biscuit!

A few weeks ago, the Green co-leader Ross Greer posted a Labour leaflet from Strathkelvin & Bearsden, mocking it for containing a particularly extreme example of a misleading Lib Dem-style bar chart.  Ironically, its sole purpose was to try to convince local voters that the Lib Dems couldn't win the constituency.  It showed the SNP on "three", Labour on "two", and others on "one".  The explanation of these mysteriously small numbers was that they represented the amount of times each party had won Strathkelvin & Bearsden since devolution began in 1999. But as Greer pointed out, Labour's two victories were in 1999 and 2007, and so were pretty much irrelevant to the question of who the main challengers to the SNP are in the present-day.

It has to be said, though, that the Greens themselves have managed to top Labour's effort with an even more bonkers leaflet in Edinburgh Central.  It not only claims that "Lorna Slater is winning Edinburgh Central" but provides a bar chart which purports to show that "it's between the Scottish Greens and Labour in Edinburgh Central".  (As fluent speakers of Barchartese will instantly know, those words translate as "it's actually a three-cornered fight between the SNP, Labour and the Greens, but we'd rather you didn't know that because it's mainly the SNP we need to take votes from".)  The bar chart specifically claims that the Greens are on 28%, Labour are on 22% and the SNP are in only third on 21%.  These numbers are, to put it mildly, somewhat improbable because:

* The SNP won Edinburgh Central five years ago, with the Tories in second place, Labour third, and the Greens a distant fourth.

* Although the boundaries of the constituency have changed, the notional results suggest the SNP would still have won in 2021, with Labour moving into second, the Tories in third and the Greens remaining in a distant fourth.

* Even making a common sense adjustment for the fact that there was no Green candidate in the new part of the constituency in 2021, the Greens would still have been in fourth place.

* Although the Greens are undoubtedly in a stronger position now than they were in 2021, no MRP projection of the campaign so far supports their claim that Edinburgh Central is a two-horse race between themselves and Labour.  YouGov have the constituency as a virtual three-way dead heat, with the SNP and Greens both on 25% and Labour on 23%, while Find Out Now have the SNP clearly ahead on 28%, the Greens in second place on 23% and Labour not that far behind on 21%.

So what on earth could the source be for this wildly improbable notion that Edinburgh Central is a two-horse race between Labour and the Greens?  If you check the small print on the Green leaflet, you'll find out.  It states: "source: ballotbox.scot".  That means the Ballot Box Scotland website.  You know, the same Ballot Box Scotland website that is run solely by a young gentleman by the name of Allan Faulds, who is a former serial Scottish Green party candidate in local elections and European Parliament elections.  He's since nominally "left" the party, although he's made little secret of the fact that he did that solely for appearance's sake, ie. in the hope that people would stop laughing quite so hard whenever he angrily protests that his "project" is "non-partisan".  He's also (perhaps surprisingly) made no secret of the truly heroic lengths he's gone to in order to flatter the Greens in the constituency projections on his site - he states in black and white that he factors in the 2021 list vote for projecting the Green constituency vote in 2026, but that he does not do this for any other party.  To put in some perspective just how absurd that is, if you did use the 2021 list vote as a baseline for other parties, you'd be pretty close to projecting the SNP as being ahead in the Lib Dem fortresses of Shetland and Edinburgh North Western, which would plainly be barmy.  

It's even worse than that, though, because notional figures show the Greens were a long way behind the SNP even on the list in Edinburgh Central in 2021 - and although they were in second place, both Labour and the Tories were only fractionally behind them.  Any reasonable person looking at the bar chart on the Green leaflet would assume it's based on some kind of real measure of public opinion - either a real election from the past, or a real constituency-level opinion poll from the present.  But it's neither.  It's no more than a piece of candy-floss from Allan Faulds' own imagination, which piles wild assumption upon wild assumption in order to justify using the wrong baseline figures and then 'reimagining' them as he sees fit.

In a nutshell, then, the Greens' source for the baseless claim that Edinburgh Central is a two-way fight between themselves and Labour is a baseless claim made by a Green party candidate - ie. their source is themselves.  This election is increasingly moving into Alice Through The Looking Glass territory, because the only reason I even saw the leaflet was because it was posted by the Brit Nat propagandist Sam Taylor of These Islands fame.  He's trying to boost the Green campaign in Edinburgh Central, even though he clearly has more in common with the more centrist politics of the SNP candidate Angus Robertson than he does with Lorna Slater.  Why is he doing that?  Because it's the SNP he sees as the threat to his beloved Union, and he thinks losing Robertson would leave the SNP weakened.

Might just be worth bearing that in mind.

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My latest constituency profiles for The National are Glasgow Southside and Glasgow Kelvin & Maryhill.  I'm on a roll with these constituencies that I can claim a connection to, because I'm a graduate of Glasgow University, which is in the Kelvin & Maryhill seat.

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If you are enjoying Scot Goes Pop's election coverage so much that you start to feel an inexplicable urge to buy me a hot chocolate or a ham-and-cheese toastie, donations are very welcome.  There are three main options: 
a) you can donate by card HERE 
b) you can make a direct PayPal donation to my PayPal email address, which is: jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk
c) you can make a donation by bank transfer - for the necessary details, please drop me a line at my contact email address, which is: icehouse.250@gmail.com

*  *  * 

Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.

REVEALED: The hard science that makes Both Votes SNP such an effective strategy - why the "Make Mine A Double" voting craze is mathematically sound as well as fashionable and trendy

OK, the title of this blogpost is mainly there to wind up Stew, but there is actually a very serious point behind it, and it's one that may make you think about the importance of voting SNP on the list ballot in a wholly new way.  Patrick English, who seems to have been the key figure behind YouGov's new MRP poll for the Holyrood election, posted a thread on Twitter about the poll with some observations that I found genuinely startling - 

"Scotland is never an easy place in which to project elections, but we've given it a go.

Based on the data, our central expectation is that the SNP would win an outright majority if the election were happening right now

They do so in our model by hoovering up all but seven of Holyrood's 73 constituencies, plus a regional list seat in the Highland and Islands.

Such is the extent of the SNP constituency sweep, our central projection has Labour winning zero constituencies for the first time ever.

Each of Labour's 15 seats come from the lists.

Similarly, while we currently have Reform in second place, all their 20 projected wins are also list seats.

The Greens however we think have a good shot at winning their first ever Holyrood constituency (either Glasgow/Edinburgh).

Our model is, as it stands, pretty bullish on an SNP majority despite them only being two seats above the line (65).

The reason why is that even if the SNP start losing constituency seats, in many such scenarios they start winning extra regional list seats to compensate.

For example, let's imagine that Labour benefited from a big push of tactical Unionist support in Central and took three seats off the SNP there.

Unless the SNP also started dropping list votes, they'd win one regional seat to take them back up to 65!

Similarly, let's say the SNP lost Moray in the Highlands and Islands to Reform, who are currently second placed there.

The SNP would immediately then win a list seat in that region to compensate for that loss.

Another reason for model bullishness is the fragmentation of the pro-Union constituency vote behind the SNP, plus the boost they get from the Greens stepping aside in all but six seats.

Projected SNP majorities range from 7pts in Dumfriesshire to 27pts in Coatbridge and Chryston

These SNP cushions, plus the projected strong performance of the Greens, make it very difficult to see anything other than yet another SNP-led administration after May 7th *as things stand*.

As for securing official opposition status, it's a battle between Reform and Labour."

Remember that he's saying all of this about a state of play in which it's assumed that the SNP will be taking just 32% of the list vote nationally - way down on what they have received in all of the last three Holyrood elections.  I wouldn't previously have thought that a 32% list vote could have much role to play in getting the SNP over the line for a majority in a situation where they fall a little short of 65 constituency seats, but this guy has run all of the simulations and he's clearly saying that it very well could.  Even on the central projection from the poll, the SNP would take one list seat in the Highlands & Islands, but it sounds very much like a list vote for the SNP will play a crucial back-up role in other regions by compensating the SNP if they fail to take as many constituency seats as they hope.

As 32% of the national list vote is a perfectly achievable target, this should really be enough to convince SNP supporters to back the party on both ballots.  Clearly much of the commentary so far (including from the former YouGov president Peter Kellner in the bizarre article that was picked up by Lesley Riddoch recently) has severely underestimated the SNP's chances of taking seats on the list.  Perhaps for independence supporters who don't identify strongly with any particular political party, there may still be a difficult choice to make between the SNP and the Greens on the list, because clearly the Greens are capable of winning list seats too, and may win more than the SNP do.  But for anyone weighing up whether to vote for the SNP on the list, or for one of the wide array of pro-indy fringe parties like Atlas or ISP, there's strictly no contest - the SNP have a chance of taking seats on the list, and the fringe parties have no chance whatsoever.  That decision is an absolute no-brainer.

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You can read my constituency profile of Glasgow Easterhouse & Springburn for The National HERE.  That's another Glasgow constituency that I can claim a tenuous connection to, in the sense that I was born there (at Stobhill Hospital in Springburn).

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If you are enjoying Scot Goes Pop's election coverage so much that you start to feel an inexplicable urge to buy me a hot chocolate or a ham-and-cheese toastie, donations are very welcome.  There are three main options: 
a) you can donate by card HERE 
b) you can make a direct PayPal donation to my PayPal email address, which is: jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk
c) you can make a donation by bank transfer - for the necessary details, please drop me a line at my contact email address, which is: icehouse.250@gmail.com

*  *  * 

Over the last few months, I've been building up the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube - you can check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe.