Pro-independence campaign cut the gap to yet another record low in dramatic new YouGov poll

A new referendum poll has just been released on the Channel 4 News website. It was conducted by YouGov, traditionally one of the most No-friendly pollsters, and shows the No lead falling to a new record low for the campaign so far -

Should Scotland be an independent country?

Yes 37% (n/c)
No 51% (-1)

Due to rounding, the position is unchanged when Don't Knows are excluded (although of course the numbers still replicate the record high for Yes recorded in the last survey) -

Yes 42% (n/c)
No 58% (n/c)

For the avoidance of doubt, Channel 4's reporting of this poll is utterly and absurdly misleading, and doubtless we can "look forward" to more of the same in televisual form at 7pm tonight. They are comparing apples with oranges (or apples with tractors, more like) by suggesting that this poll is somehow reasonably OK for the No campaign because it shows the lead as being higher than in "other recent results", which is presumably a reference to ICM, Survation and Panelbase polls. The reality is, of course, that different polling organisations have been producing wildly different numbers in this campaign, and the only way of making sense of any new poll is to compare it with previous polls from the same company.

YouGov suggested that the No camp reached their high watermark in August of last year, with a 59% share of the vote and a seemingly impregnable 30% lead over Yes. The lead dipped sharply to 20% the following month, which some commentators dismissed as an illusion caused by methodological changes. The figures then seemed to stabilise somewhat, and until a few weeks ago the lead had still not fallen below 18%, allowing YouGov's unionist-oriented chief Peter Kellner to claim a "no change" position - even though almost every other pollster was showing a statistically significant drop in the No lead since the publication of the White Paper. Kellner's fantasy finally went out of the window in late March when YouGov showed the No lead slumping to 15% - easily its lowest of the campaign so far, and just half of the August lead. Now it has slipped even further to 14%.

Professor John Curtice will doubtless issue a caution that a one-point drop in the No lead is well within the margin of error and is not necessarily significant in statistical terms, and that is perfectly true. But the same could initially have been said about the 3% drop in the No lead in the previous YouGov poll. This new poll does two things - it makes it dramatically less likely that the No lead only fell outside its normal range in the last poll due to normal sampling variation, and it opens up at least the possibility that there has been even further slippage in the No lead since March.

Some Yes supporters may be encouraged by the trend, but still wonder if it's possible to achieve an outright victory when any pollster is showing a 14% lead for our opponents with four-and-a-half months to go until polling day. There are two answers to that. Firstly, it depends on whether YouGov are actually getting their methodology right. If ICM and Panelbase are closer to the truth, then YouGov are probably overstating the No lead by about 10%, which means that Yes only require an extremely modest 2-3% swing to win (in YouGov terms that would still leave the No campaign with a 'phantom' lead in the region of 9-11%). The second answer, of course, is that even if YouGov are right, Yes would still only require a swing that is smaller than the one the SNP achieved over a shorter timescale in the run-up to the 2011 election.

YouGov also asked a series of supplementary questions on a range of standard scare stories about independence, and the results are nothing short of a horror show for the No campaign. By a margin of 45% to 38%, respondents think that an independent Scotland would be able to use the pound as part of a formal currency union. (Surely that doesn't mean we think that all three London parties are fibbing?) By a comfortable margin of 46% to 34%, voters think that an independent Scotland would be able to remain a member of the EU. (Andrew Marr thinks they're wrong, he has to say.) By a margin of 41% to 38%, they think an independent Scotland would be able to maintain state pensions at the current level, and by a margin of 43% to 40% they do not anticipate that major businesses and employers would leave Scotland after independence.

But look on the bright side, Mr McDougall - we still have no idea whether voters bought the scare story about the pandas being whisked away. Maybe that should be the subject of your next internal poll?

As usual, YouGov have indulged in their eccentric practice of splitting people who recall voting SNP in 2011 into two groups, and weighting them separately. One of the groups is not upweighted at all, while the other group is upweighted massively. It's very troubling that YouGov never reveal the breakdown of voting intentions for those two groups, because until and unless they do the suspicion is bound to linger that this procedure is largely the explanation for the sharp divergence with the more Yes-friendly results produced by all of the other online polling companies. However, that's only speculation.

* * *

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

As you'd expect, the latest update of this blog's Poll of Polls shows the No lead slipping to another all-time low.  It now stands at just 11.2%.

MEAN AVERAGE (not excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 35.8% (n/c)
No 47.0% (-0.2)

MEAN AVERAGE (excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 43.2% (+0.1)
No 56.8% (-0.1)

MEDIAN AVERAGE (excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 43.6% (+0.2)
No 56.4% (-0.2)

(The Poll of Polls is based on a rolling average of the most recent poll from each of the pollsters that have been active in the referendum campaign since September 2013, and that adhere to British Polling Council rules. At present, there are six - YouGov, TNS-BMRB, Survation, Panelbase, Ipsos-Mori and ICM. Whenever a new poll is published, it replaces the last poll from the same company in the sample. Changes in the Poll of Polls are generally glacial in nature due to the fact that only a small portion of the sample is updated each time.)

Here are the long-term trend figures, with the previous numbers recalculated to exclude the inactive pollster Angus Reid...

The No campaign's lead in the Poll of Polls headline figures :

Sep 2013 - 21.6%
Sep 2013 - 21.4%
Sep 2013 - 19.4%
Oct 2013 - 18.8%
Oct 2013 - 18.4%
Oct 2013 - 18.2%
Nov 2013 - 18.4%
Nov 2013 - 18.0%
Dec 2013 - 17.0%
Dec 2013 - 16.8%
Dec 2013 - 16.4%
Jan 2014 - 14.4%
Jan 2014 - 14.2%
Jan 2014 - 14.2%
Jan 2014 - 15.2%
Feb 2014 - 15.0%
Feb 2014 - 15.5%
Feb 2014 - 15.5%
Feb 2014 - 13.7%
Feb 2014 - 13.3%
Feb 2014 - 14.2%
Mar 2014 - 14.2%
Mar 2014 - 14.5%
Mar 2014 - 14.5%
Mar 2014 - 14.7%
Mar 2014 - 13.8%
Mar 2014 - 13.0%
Mar 2014 - 12.5%
Apr 2014 - 12.5%
Apr 2014 - 12.7%
Apr 2014 - 12.7%
Apr 2014 - 12.3%
Apr 2014 - 11.4%
May 2014 - 11.2%

And finally, an update of the averages for the four online pollsters that have reported so far this year (YouGov, ICM, Survation and Panelbase) -

MEAN AVERAGE OF ONLINE POLLSTERS (not excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 38.5% (n/c)
No 46.0% (-0.3)

MEAN AVERAGE OF ONLINE POLLSTERS (excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 45.6% (+0.2)
No 54.4% (-0.2)

MEDIAN AVERAGE OF ONLINE POLLSTERS (excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 46.1% (n/c)
No 53.9% (n/c)