Survation poll offers glimmer of hope by suggesting the SNP are only four points behind

After the disappointment of the Redfield & Wilton numbers a few hours ago, a new full-scale Scottish poll from Survation has offered a bit more hope by putting the SNP just four points behind Labour - the smallest gap any polling firm has shown since John Swinney became leader.

Scottish voting intentions for the UK general election (Survation / True North):

Labour 36%

SNP 32%

Conservatives 17%

Liberal Democrats 9%

Seats projection: Labour 28, SNP 16, Conservatives 8, Liberal Democrats 5

So there are two important points about the slenderness of the gap.  Firstly, it gives the SNP hope that they might still be able to overhaul the deficit, although ideally they'd want to do that in the early stages of the campaign before postal votes are cast.  But secondly, even if they don't get back into the lead, the seats projection (which was calculated by John Curtice) shows there may be a reward for keeping things close.  Sixteen seats for the SNP is twice as many as we saw in the projection from the recent YouGov poll.  While slumping to sixteen seats would be seen as just as big a disaster on election night as slumping to seven or eight would, after a year or two things would look different, and the importance of retaining a substantial presence in the Commons would seem obvious.  It would still be a better position than the SNP had at any point prior to 2015, including the 1974-79 parliament when they had only 11 seats out of 71.

The fact that the Tories are actually gaining a couple of seats on the projection also suggests the SNP have an opportunity to squeeze out more than sixteen seats if they can get an anti-Tory tactical voting bandwagon going in the several Tory-SNP marginals.

There's also a touch of bad news from the poll, which is the first poll since the change of SNP leadership not to show John Swinney as more popular than his Labour counterparts.  Incomprehensibly, Keir Starmer has a net positive rating, albeit a modest one of +3, while Anas Sarwar is on -3 and Swinney is on -7.  But everything is relative - that's a small gap which is nowhere near as much of a problem as would exist if Humza Yousaf was still leader.

Unusually, the full range of Alba leaders are asked about, and the results are a mixed bag.  Neale Hanvey's net rating is respectable enough at -12.  Ash Regan's rating is poor at -24, but that's only fractionally worse than the Greens' Patrick Harvie (-22) and Lorna Slater (-22).  But Alex Salmond remains the least popular politician asked about, with his rating of -45 being seven points worse than Rishi Sunak.  As I've noted multiple times before, this is such a dilemma for Alba - in normal circumstances it would be obviously suboptimal to have a leader with a rating of -45, but it may well be that Alba only attract as much media attention as they do because of who their leader is, and that if they replaced him in the pursuit of better ratings, they'd end up being completely ignored, which is the worst outcome of all for a small party.

By the way, if anyone from Survation happens to be reading this (not impossible on past form), could I just point out that you're still spelling Ash Regan's name wrong.  In fact, it's got even worse - you're now calling her "Ash Reagen".

I've previewed Stephen Flynn's constituency race in Aberdeen South for The National - you can read the piece HERE.