Yousaf appears to have spent half the Sky News debate telling blatant lies about opinion poll results - in fact, the new YouGov / Sky News poll has Kate Forbes ahead of him among SNP voters on several key questions

Humza Yousaf was absolutely obsessed with talking about opinion poll results during the Sky News leadership debate tonight, which suggests to me he's very worried about what the polls are actually showing and is desperately trying to muddy the waters with a mixture of lies, half-truths and distortions.  Although Kate Forbes clearly came out on top in the debate, one thing that disappointed me was that she didn't properly challenge Yousaf's fibs about polling.  He kept asking her what essentially was a "when did you stop beating your wife?" question, ie. variants on "is that why I've pulled ahead of you among SNP supporters, Kate?", which is based on a completely false premise.  In fact, the Panelbase poll which I published two days ago (and which is more or less bang up to date - the fieldwork ran until Friday) showed Forbes ahead of Yousaf among SNP voters from the 2019 general election, SNP voters from the 2021 Scottish Parliament election, and Yes voters from the 2014 independence referendum.

Yousaf repeatedly made two claims about opinion polls tonight -

* That he had gone from being behind among SNP supporters earlier in the campaign to being "nineteen points ahead".

* That he had "quadrupled his support with the Scottish public" over the course of the campaign.

The latter seems to be a very cynical apples-and-oranges comparison between the current three-way polls, and polls from several weeks ago that asked about a much wider range of potential candidates.  For example, there was a Savanta poll in mid-February which showed the following - 

Kate Forbes: 14%

Angus Robertson: 9%

John Swinney: 9%

Humza Yousaf: 6%

Mairi Gougeon: 3%

Shona Robison: 2%

Neil Gray: 2%

Shirley-Anne Somerville: 1%

Others: 4%

Don't Knows: 50%

I mean, if Humza couldn't improve on a 6% showing after six of the above potential candidates ruled themselves out, including Robertson and Swinney who had 18% support between them, something would be going very, very badly wrong somewhere.  Using the same bogus comparison, Kate Forbes would be able to claim that she's more than doubled her support over the same period (in fact far more than doubled it), even though she was in the lead right from the start.

But as for the claim about Yousaf currently being nineteen points ahead among SNP supporters, I'm inclined to think that should be regarded as an outright lie.  He implied he was taking the numbers from the new Sky News / YouGov poll.  I've searched the data tables from that poll, and I cannot find anything that looks even remotely like a nineteen point lead.  He'll probably come up with some sort of ultra-contrived and ultra-convoluted figleaf justification for his claim, but to all intents and purposes it was a lie.  (Unless of course he had access to information that YouGov forgot to include in the data tables - I'll concede that's a theoretical possibility but it seems unlikely.)

The real results among SNP voters in the YouGov poll are mixed - Yousaf does fare better than Forbes on one question (not 19 points better, let me stress), but Forbes fares better on all of the others.  For example, Yousaf has a poorer rating than Forbes among SNP voters on the question of whether each candidate would be a better or worse First Minister than Nicola Sturgeon.

YouGov / Sky News poll (9th-13th March 2023):

Net approval ratings on the question of 'better or worse than Nicola Sturgeon', SNP voters only:

Ash Regan: -40

Kate Forbes: -41

Humza Yousaf: -49

That's obviously poor for all of the candidates, presumably due to the high regard SNP voters hold Nicola Sturgeon in, but nevertheless Yousaf clearly comes out worst.  Forbes is also preferred to Yousaf by SNP voters on other key measures...

Percentage of SNP voters who think each candidate is "strong":

Kate Forbes: 34%

Humza Yousaf: 33%

Ash Regan: 19%

Percentage of SNP voters who think each candidate is "competent":

Kate Forbes: 47%

Humza Yousaf: 41%

Ash Regan: 27%

Percentage of SNP voters who think each candidate is "trustworthy":

Kate Forbes: 38%

Humza Yousaf: 35%

Ash Regan: 20%

Whether Yousaf actually deserves to be trusted by as many as 35% of SNP voters is doubtful, because if you can't even trust him to tell the truth about opinion poll results, what the hell can you trust him to tell the truth about?

Incidentally, even on the one question in which SNP voters prefer him to Forbes in the poll, he's actually behind Forbes among Yes voters from 2014.

Net approval ratings on question of 'would he/she make a good or bad First Minister', Yes voters only:

Kate Forbes: -2

Ash Regan: -8

Humza Yousaf: -8

Let me just stress in closing that all of the above numbers are from either SNP voters only, or Yes voters only.  The bigger picture is that among the general public, Kate Forbes has an enormous lead over Humza Yousaf on every single measure - some of those numbers can be found HERE.

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Over the last few days I've published results from TWO new Scot Goes Pop opinion polls - an opportunity to commission a second poll suddenly arose, so I made a snap decision to go ahead.  However, as you'll appreciate, polls are very expensive, so if anyone feels able to make a contribution, here are the options...

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