Monday, March 8, 2021

It's official: Savanta ComRes confirm that the Scotland on Sunday "poll" should not be treated as a proper independence poll. Time for (another) correction and apology from Sarah Smith and the BBC.

Savanta ComRes have published the datasets from the now-notorious #Matchettgate "poll", published in the Scotland on Sunday and jubilantly recited by the legendarily "impartial" Sarah Smith on the Marr show.  (In fairness Sophy Ridge and Sky were even worse than the Beeb - they apparently put the numbers up on a big screen!)  There's a very interesting explanatory note provided on the ComRes website

"The voting intention was not weighted by likelihood to vote and should not be treated as a headline Savanta ComRes voting intention.  The voting intention was asked to give The Scotsman an indication as to current levels of Yes/No support." 

You can hardly get more direct and explicit than that.  This should not be treated as a proper independence poll and anyone who was initially duped - and that includes myself - should correct the record.  I've already done so, and I hope we can now look forward to the same from the BBC and Sky.  It's particularly important that the BBC issue a prominent correction, because they've been telling us for years that they have a policy of not reporting on voting intention polls, and have used that as an excuse for not keeping viewers and listeners updated on the recent run of Yes-majority polls.  If that policy was casually tossed out of the window because a reporter couldn't contain her excitement at No being back in the lead, and that poll then turns out to be bogus...well, something has self-evidently gone very badly wrong, and it needs to be put right.

Incidentally, this development also puts beyond dispute the observation I made yesterday.  Right now, the last twenty-six legitimate polls have all shown Yes on 50% or higher, after Don't Knows are stripped out.  That may not be the case within a few short hours, because apparently more polls are due tonight.  But as of this moment, the remarkable run of Yes success continues.

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I also took a quick look at the Panelbase website to see if the datasets from the Sunday Times poll are out yet, but they're not.  However, what I found instead were datasets for a poll commissioned in January by an organisation called 'Scotland Unhyphenated'.  They may well have been there for several weeks.  This solves the mystery of the unionist propaganda poll with the insanely biased questions that I blogged about at the time.  The results are, to be honest, a mixed bag - with such leading questions it was almost inevitable that they'd at least get some 'hits'.  However, rather amusingly, there are two questions in particular that backfired on the client horrendously...

Should Scots living in the Rest of the UK be allowed a vote in a future Scottish independence referendum?

Yes 44%
No 56%

That'll be a useful one for pro-Yes politicians to have in their back pocket whenever Andrew Neil starts banging on about one of his favourite topics.  Perhaps surprisingly, there's no real difference between Yes voters and No voters on this - 56% of No voters think ex-pats shouldn't have a vote.

Do you consider the SNP contingent of MPs at Westminster to be...

Representative of the Scottish character: 52%
An embarrassment: 48%

Of course the only real embarrassment here was the question.  Whoever this 'Unhyphenated' dude is, he doesn't seem to do shades of grey.

23 comments:

  1. The poll will no doubt, and rightly, be struck off from the survey records.

    I wish I could have the same confidence that the same fate awaits one Sarah Smith as regards her membership of the journalism profession.

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  2. great work james , all scotland asks is a level playing field andd bbc cant even do that

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  3. Westminster are very worried. Expect more manufactured news like No Borders in 2014.

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  4. Scotland Unhyphenated obviously a Lib Dem who has some kind of a feud with Alex Cole-Hamilton.

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  5. All the same our shooting star is no longer in the ascendant - it's not surprising there's a dip but I would have thought more 50% / 50% ... anyway

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  6. "Time for (another) correction and apology from Sarah Smith and the BBC."

    Time for the SNP leadership to stick the boot into the britnat bbc.

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  7. I'm not following this. What does "The voting intention was asked to give The Scotsman an indication as to current levels of Yes/No support" mean? Isn't that the ostensible purpose of all opinion polling? And how does it explain their decision not to weight the results?

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    1. It's pretty obvious that something has happened behind the scenes that we're never going to find out about. To me, and maybe I'm too cynical, that explanatory note reads like code for "we wish The Scotsman hadn't done this". It may never have been intended for publication.

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  8. Should Scots living in the Rest of the UK be allowed a vote in a future Scottish independence referendum?
    Yes 44%
    No 56%


    Well, that's the residents of Bath ruled out. Michael Gove and Stuart Campbell won't be happy.

    Ironically, it will be unionists that wanted this. However, for such a thing as an 'expatriate Scot' to legally exist in a definable form, you need Scottish nationality to exist, which requires independence.

    In the absence of that, legal residency for tax purposes etc is the only way to formally define a Scot for the purposes of voting.

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    1. As far as I can recall, Stu has never suggested he should vote in a referendum as he acknowledges he does currently live in Scotland. So why spout it? I used to think you had something valuable to say, but for the last several months it's been pretty poor stuff.

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    2. That's "Doesn't" of course. (No edit function?)

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  9. Woah!

    I understand this is a quasi-random sample so targeted, meaning it should already match well demographics.

    Which it does...

    Unweighted numbers:
    2016 EU
    36% Leave
    64% Remain
    = Spot on within 2%

    2019 UK
    49% SNP
    24% Con
    16% Lab
    8% Lib
    = We bit ae an overestimate on SNP, but just outside MoE.

    49% SNP
    24% Con
    16% Lab
    8% Lib

    We bit ae an overestimate on SNP, but just outside MoE.

    Then we get to:

    2014
    58.4% Yes
    41.6% No

    Whit TF? That's a lot of people telling porkies. Either seriously poor recall or white lies due to regret. Either way, Yes voters are heavily down-weighted. Yes is probably a lot higher than calculated.

    This has been a notable problem since 2014, but this is the worst I have seen it.

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    1. Is that the ComRes poll? Yes, I noticed there was a big downweighting of Yes voters. (It seems Scotland on Sunday have no problem with polls that have *that* sort of weighting!)

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    2. James. In your next poll, might be an idea to have them weight just to 2019 and EU ref at most to compare with weighting to 2014, 2016x2 and 2019.

      TBH it's getting stupid weighting to 2014 given the huge changes in the electorate since then. It's just not the same people.

      Simple demographic changes mean that the Yes to No ration is increasing while the number of DNVs is rising, assuming everyone is actually honest.

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    3. I can't do that. It's unlikely that a pollster would agree to change their weighting scheme to suit the wishes of a partisan client, and if I even asked them to do it, that would make me as bad as Scotland on Sunday. However, I've publicly expressed my view that 2014 weighting may be getting close to its sell-by date.

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    4. Ok, but I was interested in it as an exercise. I wasn't suggesting the normal weighting wasn't used for headline figures. The weighting is a simple spreadsheet calculation.

      I guess however they might not like their own methods being questioned. I remember when 2010 weighting was clearly off and eventually the industry accepted that, reluctantly...

      The very poor recall of 2014 compared to recent elections etc shows there's something wrong.

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  10. Problem with the 56/44 against letting Scots in England (or elsewhere) vote in a referendum is that the premise of the poll accepts the conclusion. In other words Scots in England were not included in the poll about whether Scots in England should be included in a referendum. If they had been included the result might have been different.

    By the way I think people who live in Scotland should,be the franchise. That’s just logical and fair, not based on an opinion poll.

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  11. Should Scots living in the Rest of the UK be allowed a vote in a future Scottish independence referendum?

    I know 15 holiday home owners in my wee corner of Scotland who voted in the last Referendum. I know they voted No because I canvassed them prior to the last referendum. They were quite proud of the fact they were voting No and rubbed my face in it. Not one of them were Scots ex-pats either.

    Money it seems can buy you votes in a Referendum. Nobody stopped these Kipper/Tory voting c!!!s at the Border either despite Covid 19.

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    1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    2. Too true, maybe they should be banned from voting in a Scottish independence referendum like they banned the EU nationals? What could anyone say about that in truth.

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  12. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  13. However, the headline of "SNP power struggle makes Scots change their minds about independence" is too good for survey technicalities to get in the way. The story even made it to a major news outlet in Germany, which usually shows no interest at all in Scot Indy:

    https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/schottland-politikskandal-beeinflusst-wunsch-nach-unabhaengigkeit-a-8e218e79-4ed6-4988-8a0b-91772d34965d

    Allow myself to translate the first paragraph:

    ---
    Do Scots still want independence? And if yes, how many?

    Only 43% OF Scots want to leave the UK. Can the Sturgeon administration turn it around?

    Until recently, all signs pointed towards independence. Enough with commands from London, enough with the struggles and fallout surrounding Brexit, enough with CoVid chaos under BJ leadership. The majority of Scots favoured becoming independent.

    But now the tides have turned. By a 46-43 margin Scots would vote to remain in the UK, were a referendum to be held today. That's the conclusion of a representative survey done by "Scotland on Sunday".

    The reason for this change of mind is a scandal surronuding the former FM of cotland, Alex Salmond ... yada yada

    ---

    Of course, there are more important things than the question if the fine people in Bersenbrück are adequately informed about indy polling. But these kind of headlines stick. Hundreds of thousands of people will read the title and think: "Well, so that's settled. Politicians, right?"

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  14. Scots taxpayers and/or those with a Scottish passport should get a vote, be these in the rUK or anywhere globally.

    Direct any complaints about the passport condition to unionists.

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