Subsample average fails to find any post-locals momentum for the Scottish Tories

Well, the "remarkable" poll in the Sunday Times did turn out to be an anti-climax, not for either of the reasons I speculated last night, but simply because it was a poll that had already been published and that we already knew about!  It was a GB-wide Ashcroft poll, but the Sunday Times are reading huge significance into the results of the Scottish subsample, because "far more" Scottish respondents were interviewed than for a standard full-scale Scottish poll.  That gives the entirely misleading impression that the results are more accurate than a full-scale Scottish poll, whereas in fact a properly weighted poll of 1000 people should be more accurate than an unweighted subsample of 3,500.  In any case, even a weighted poll of 3,500 wouldn't be dramatically more accurate than a poll of 1000.

Even if you take them seriously, the Ashcroft numbers are already a couple of weeks out of date (they precede the local elections) and don't show anything radically different from what we've seen in the campaign so far.  The SNP's lead is 11% - exactly the same as in the full-scale Panelbase poll.

So we still await the first Scottish poll since the local elections, and in the meantime all we can do is look at an average of the very small number of Scottish subsamples conducted over the last seven days, which suggests there hasn't been any further momentum for the Tories.

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

SNP 42.8% (-2.2)
Conservatives 30.3% (-1.2)
Labour 15.0% (-0.8)
Liberal Democrats 7.5% (+2.7)

(The Poll of Polls for Westminster voting intentions uses the Scottish subsamples from all GB-wide polls that have been conducted entirely within the last seven days and for which datasets have been provided, and also all full-scale Scottish polls that have been conducted at least partly within the last seven days. Full-scale polls are given ten times the weighting of subsamples.)