Nicola Sturgeon wins the debate by a landslide, say viewers in Scotland

The datasets from the Survation instant reaction poll are now out, and the Scottish subsample shows that respondents north of the border thought Nicola Sturgeon won the seven-way leaders' debate by a comfortable margin.

Who do you think won the debate?  (Survation, Scottish respondents only) :

Nicola Sturgeon 46.5%
Ed Miliband 24.8%
Nigel Farage 13.3%
David Cameron 8.9%
Nick Clegg 5.6%
Leanne Wood 0.9%
Natalie Bennett 0.0%

This is hugely significant, because at Britain-wide level the Survation poll was actually the weakest for Sturgeon of the four polls we've seen this evening.  So when we see all the Scottish subsamples, it's highly likely that Sturgeon will have scored a decisive victory across the board.

UPDATE : And here is the very similar Scottish subsample from ICM. I haven't actually located the datasets yet, so I'm taking these numbers on trust!

Which of the seven leaders taking part do you think won the contest? (ICM, Scottish respondents only) :

Nicola Sturgeon 49%
Ed Miliband 16%
David Cameron 12%
Nigel Farage 11%
Natalie Bennett 5%
Nick Clegg 4%
Leanne Wood 3%

The YouGov datasets have been released, but irritatingly they don't contain a geographical breakdown.  Perhaps more detail will appear tomorrow.  However, as Sturgeon won that poll on a Britain-wide level, we can safely assume that she was well ahead in the Scottish subsample.

What struck me most about the debate was that Nicola Sturgeon and Leanne Wood pursued almost opposite strategies - Sturgeon downplayed the Scottish dimension and presented herself almost as a UK political leader, while Leanne Wood mentioned Wales several times in practically every answer.  The strange thing is that their objectives were exactly the same, ie. to maximise the vote for their party in their own constituent nation of the UK.  So they both thought they had the best strategy for achieving that objective, and they can't both have been right.

Although Wood was the least polished performer (with the possible exception of Natalie Bennett), it seems to me that the constant mentions of Wales may be a big part of the reason why she fared so poorly in the GB-wide polls.  Many English people will have thought "she's not even interested in me".  That doesn't necessarily mean that she made a misjudgement - if she was able to speak directly to her target voters and if they liked what they heard, then it will all have been worth it.  She'd much rather see Plaid Cymru make two or three gains in May than finish third or fourth in a Britain-wide debate poll.  But the flipside is that her target voters could actually have been impressed by a good showing in the British polls, and that's an advantage the SNP will now enjoy and Plaid Cymru won't.

The polling firms are split on whether Cameron or Miliband performed better, but they're all agreed that it was a very close battle between the two.  So, as was the case with the Paxman interview show last week, Miliband has exceeded expectations, and is probably closer to neutralising Labour's huge leadership handicap - which was the one and only factor that led most commentators to anticipate that the Tories would eventually pull away as the election approached.  Although an incumbent government can normally expect to benefit from swingback in the opinion polls, it generally happens before the start of the formal campaign period.  So it could be that Labour have already dodged that bullet, in which case some sort of Labour/SNP governing arrangement is now firmly on the cards.