No wonder the Mail kept it a secret : their September poll gave the SNP a huge Westminster lead

You might remember a few weeks ago that the Daily Mail published a full-scale Scottish poll from Survation, showing that the SNP were maintaining a considerable lead in Scottish Parliament voting intentions.  We knew that a question about Westminster voting intentions had also been asked, and yet mysteriously there was no mention of that anywhere in the Mail's reporting.  The obvious suspicion was that the results were good enough for the SNP that the Mail were too embarrassed to report them.  It looks like the numbers were quietly revealed on the Survation website three days ago (I missed that at the time because I was travelling), and just like Panelbase's full-scale poll they show that the SNP's position has improved since the general election - in stunning defiance of the media narrative.

Scottish voting intentions for the next Westminster general election (Survation) :

SNP 39.3% (+2.4)
Labour 26.4% (-0.7)
Conservatives 26.1% (-2.5)
Liberal Democrats 6.6% (-0.2)

(Note: This is the first Survation poll since the election, so the percentage changes listed above are from the actual election result rather than a previous poll.  The figures are weighted by recalled 2017 vote, so aren't comparable with pre-election polls in any case.)

Ironically, the SNP's Westminster lead is a little more modest than its Holyrood constituency lead, so why were the Mail happy to report the Holyrood figures but not the Westminster ones?  Quite simply, because the SNP's Holyrood vote has decreased since last year's election, allowing the Mail to put a negative spin for the party on a very healthy lead.  By contrast, it's simply not possible to put a negative spin on the Westminster figures - the Mail would have been forced to concede that the SNP stand to gain a number of seats from both Labour and the Tories in any early general election.

To be fair, the Survation poll is a touch less dramatic than Panelbase's.  In particular, the picture is somewhat rosier for Labour - they're in second place (just), their vote share is down by only a trivial amount since June, and the distance between themselves and the SNP has increased by only three percentage points.  Nevertheless, there are so many ultra-marginal seats out there that a modest swing of that sort is more than enough to do plenty of damage.

Of course such small changes could in theory be illusions caused by the standard margin of error.  But with both post-election full-scale Scottish polls showing a pro-SNP swing, it does at the very least seem highly unlikely that the SNP's position has significantly worsened since June.  That goes against pretty much everyone's expectations at the end of summer - and it seems to be an inconvenient truth that the unionist media would prefer you didn't know about.

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