Throughout the SNP leadership election, polls consistently showed that Kate Forbes was far more popular with the general public than Humza Yousaf. Weirdly, though, Yousaf made several attempts to get those poor polling results to work in his favour by zeroing in on his showing among SNP voters, which he claimed was all that mattered. The claim that he was ahead of Forbes among SNP voters was always based on smoke and mirrors, because only roughly half of polls actually showed that. The other half showed Forbes ahead among SNP voters, which probably means the two leading candidates were roughly level-pegging with each other on that measure. Combined with Forbes' far, far greater popularity among the wider public, that should have been more than enough to seal the deal for her in any party that cared about winning elections and was thinking rationally.
But if Yousaf's claims of popularity among the SNP's own supporters were questionable during the leadership campaign, they're even more questionable now, because the new YouGov poll shows his net approval rating dipping to just +4 among people who voted SNP at the last general election. The best way of putting that into perspective is to compare it to the opposition leaders' net ratings among their own parties' voters from 2019.
There’s a regional breakdown on the YouGov poll.
ReplyDeleteAll is not as it may first appear if you plug the headline (Scotland wide %’s) into a seat calculator.
The Tories are doing better (as would be expected) in the NE, H&I & South.
The SNP are largely equally distributed across the regions.
A crude assessment (Westminster) would have the SNP wiped out in > Glasgow, but the Glasgow figures are SNP 44%, Labour 28%. Lothian: SNP 39%, Labour 29%.
Interesting to see a fair tightening of the polls UK wide. The Tories still have a fair distance to claw back, but Sunak is really starting to nip at Starmer's heels in the best PM questions.
ReplyDeleteObviously it would be a tall order for them, but if the Tories were to snatch a surprise win of some kind next year, I'm curious if we'd see a stalling of Labour's recovery in Scotland.
The most interesting prospect would be if Labour are able to pull off some sort of recovery in Scotland, while snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in England. Could see Humza replaced, at the same time as a very swift reversal of Scottish Labour's fortunes.
That's all quite a way off, of course. But a 15 point (and falling) deficit for the Tories, with 18 months to go, doesn't suggest to me that they're as out of the game as Labour like to think quite yet.
Just as big a worry is that it's possible the Greens might get 6 more seats at the expense of the SNP. Can you imagine it? We'd all have to ditch our shoes and boots and wear sandals made from recycled plastic. Bags me the Coca Cola ones.
ReplyDeleteNick Chuggins