Saturday, May 6, 2017
The vastly over-hyped Scottish Tory surge
Just a quick note to let you know that I have new article in The National, which takes a look at the SNP's local election victory, points out that the Tory comeback has its limitations, and asks whether the SNP may have suppressed its own turnout by focusing so relentlessly on local issues. You can read the article HERE.
Friday, May 5, 2017
SNP soar to best ever result in local elections
As the BBC are busily misleading their viewers by claiming that the SNP have "lost seven seats since 2012", I thought it might be useful to post the real numbers.
Councillors won with changes since 2012 :
SNP 431 (+6)
Conservatives 276 (+161)
Labour 262 (-132)
Independents 172 (-28)
Liberal Democrats 67 (-4)
Greens 19 (+5)
The 2012 result was the SNP's best ever showing in a local election, so by exceeding that they have set a new record high. Even taking into account the slight change in the overall number of seats, it's also a record high for the SNP in terms of the proportion of seats they've won.
The BBC's excuse for giving inaccurate figures is that they are using 'notional results' to provide a baseline - in other words, they are using rough estimates of what the 2012 result might have been if the new boundaries had been used. In my view that is unsatisfactory. The difference between a 7-seat drop and a 6-seat increase is a trivial one, but it does have a big psychological impact, and to give viewers such precise numbers based on educated guesswork seems wholly wrong.
One other obvious point I didn't hear anyone on the BBC programme making is that if Scotland had been using the English voting system (you know, the one that artificially produced the hundreds of "incredible" Conservative gains we heard so much about), we'd have been looking at an SNP landslide and much more sweeping gains.
All the same, the three unionist parties have in combination narrowly failed to win a majority of the council seats in Scotland. It's likely that there are enough pro-union independent councillors out there to swing the balance - but it's also highly likely that those independent councillors were not elected on the basis of their constitutional views. So the Peter Kellner propaganda line that this was some sort of vote against an independence referendum simply does not stack up.
In fairness, though, perhaps we should be raising our glasses to the propagandists in London, because the over-hyping of the Tory gains is going to send expectations of a Ruth Revolution sky-high. If the SNP win three-quarters of the seats in June (which is still eminently possible), it's going to be hard for the media to plausibly switch narrative and argue that Nicola Sturgeon should be winning every single seat, and that anything short of that is all terribly unexpected.
Given the hoo-ha over the Tory surge, it's truly extraordinary just how close the Tories came to remaining stuck in third place in terms of seats - which would have been acutely embarrassing for them and would have enormously complicated their spin operation. It'll take time to pick over the entrails of the results, but I'm wondering if anti-SNP lower preferences from Tory voters helped Labour win significantly more seats in SNP/Labour battleground areas than they otherwise would have done, and paradoxically almost kept Labour in overall second place. That might also help explain why an increase in the SNP's popular vote was not replicated in the form of a significant increase in their number of councillors.
If it turns out that Labour have indeed proved a little more resilient than expected in their former heartlands on the back of Tory transfers, there may be reassurance at hand for the SNP as far as the general election is concerned. With just one vote at every Tory supporter's disposal, it's unlikely that the zealous new converts will be lending their support back to Labour in sufficient numbers to make much of a difference.
I was mightily relieved that the SNP managed to become the largest single party in my home council of North Lanarkshire by the absolute skin of their teeth. Labour and the Tories do still have the numbers in combination to freeze the SNP out of power, but will Labour take such an enormous gamble? It's one thing for them to do deals with the Tories in places like Stirling, but in North Lanarkshire they would be crucified for it.
It's fascinating to see that the Tories were "only" 11% ahead of Labour on UK-wide projected vote share - much lower than the lead suggested by most recent opinion polls for the general election. It's true that there are ample precedents to demonstrate that local election results can flatter the main opposition party, but nevertheless with Labour morale at rock bottom it wouldn't have been surprising to see carnage on a much bigger scale. Opinion polls in Britain have very rarely overestimated the Tories, but it's an interesting possibility.
Wednesday, May 3, 2017
A video guide to the local election voting system - and how to use it to defeat the Tories (and other unionist parties)
It's crept on us, but tomorrow is local election day. It'll be only the third time that the Single Transferable Vote system has been used in Scotland for nationwide elections. Instead of marking a cross on the ballot paper, we'll be using numbers to rank the candidates in order of preference. With the Scottish Tories seemingly on the march, it's now more important than ever that pro-indy voters use all or most of their preferences to rank every non-Tory candidate ahead of every Tory candidate - and, for that matter, to rank every non-unionist candidate ahead of every unionist candidate. If you're still unsure about why that's the case, the following video guide may help - it's a collaboration between myself and the amazing Phantom Power, creator of the recent Journey to Yes series. Feel free to pass it on to anyone who may find it useful. The direct link to the video on YouTube is HERE.
Monday, May 1, 2017
May Day! May Day! It's not May's Day, as Google survey reveals 57% of Scottish public prefer independence to Brexit
I'm not sure if the Record have abandoned Survation as their regular pollster, but for whatever reason they've commissioned Google to produce a Scottish political survey, which is apparently demographically representative (albeit on the basis of algorithm-derived 'inferences' rather than definite information). However, it's not yet clear that it's been politically weighted in the way that would be standard for an online poll conducted by a BPC firm, so we should certainly be very cautious about the results.
What stands out is a question asking whether people would prefer independence within the EU, or to remain in the UK under a Tory government after Brexit. The result is startlingly decisive -
Independence within EU : 56.7%
Brexit under the Tories : 43.3%
It's important to stress that this is not a "Yes lead", any more than yesterday's widely misreported Panelbase poll was. There are undoubtedly people out there who would answer "no" to the straight question "Should Scotland be an independent country?" because of misplaced doubts over whether an independent Scotland could really remain in the EU, or over whether staying in the UK really means Tory rule for the foreseeable future. But that's not to say that these findings are meaningless - they chart a course to how a Yes vote could conceivably be won, if the choice is framed correctly.
There are also voting intention numbers for the general election, which are initially quite hard to make sense of, because (in contrast to the practice in standard polls) the Don't Knows haven't been stripped out.
Westminster voting intentions :
SNP 38.9%
Conservatives 24.6%
Labour 17.8%
Greens 8.4%
Liberal Democrats 6.2%
A rough calculation suggests that the SNP would be on around 40.6% of the vote if Don't Knows were removed - essentially identical to their 41% showing in the recent YouGov poll. However, the Tories would be on only 25.7% - making this their worst showing of the general election campaign so far. The SNP's 15% lead over the Tories also equals the record in the Survation poll as the biggest lead of the campaign (compared to 13% with YouGov and 11% with Panelbase). Far more important, though, is the implausibly high vote for the Greens. If it can be assumed that a decent chunk of that vote is actually destined for the SNP, this poll is effectively implying a very, very healthy SNP lead.
All of this does of course depend on whether we can trust Google's methodology, and given that it's so untested, I'm not at all convinced that we can.
Sunday, April 30, 2017
Tyrannical Theresa takes a timely tumble in the weekend polls
As the late, great Professor Anthony King would have said in his inimitable Canadian accent, "it's another terrrr-ible night for the Conservatives". When a GB-wide YouGov poll a couple of days ago saw the Tory lead fall sharply from 23% to 16%, there was always just a chance it was a meaningless blip caused by random sampling variation, but that possibility has been snuffed out tonight by a new YouGov poll showing a further fall. The lead now stands at just 13% - meaning it has been almost halved over the course of just a week.
Britain-wide voting intentions (YouGov) :
Conservatives 44% (-1)
Labour 31% (+2)
Liberal Democrats 11% (+1)
UKIP 6% (-1)
SNP/Plaid Cymru 4% (-1)
It's possible (perhaps likely) that there will be some kind of reversion to the mean in the next YouGov poll, but there can be no real doubt that at least some of the narrowing of the gap is genuine. Other pollsters confirm it, with both ORB and Opinium agreeing that Labour have now broken back through the 30% barrier.
Britain-wide voting intentions (ORB) :
Conservatives 42% (-2)
Labour 31% (+2)
Liberal Democrats 10% (+2)
UKIP 8% (-2)
SNP 4% (-1)
Britain-wide voting intentions (Opinium) :
Conservatives 47% (+2)
Labour 30% (+4)
Liberal Democrats 8% (-3)
UKIP 7% (-2)
SNP 5% (+1)
Of course the support Labour have been clawing back is merely the low-hanging fruit - in other words, core voters who were perhaps never likely to desert the fold after considered reflection, but who temporarily got caught up in the hoo-ha over the calling of the snap election. It's interesting to speculate what the receding of the Tory surge is going to mean for Scottish voting intentions, because the surge we saw here seemed directly tied to the Britain-wide one. The obvious hope is that the new British trend will also be replicated north of the border, ideally with some Brexit/No supporters moving directly back to the SNP after flirting with Theresa May's "strength and stability" (ahem). Less ideally, we'll see Tory flirters switching to Labour - but thanks to the vagaries of first-past-the-post, that would actually work in the SNP's favour more than Labour's. By far the most important objective for the SNP is to increase the gap between themselves and the second-placed Tories - a healthy raw percentage share of the vote would just be the icing on the cake.
For what it's worth, the Scottish subsamples of both the ORB and Opinium polls give the SNP a very solid 20% advantage over the Tories. The YouGov datasets haven't yet been published at time of writing.
If (and it is still a very big if) we find that the Scottish Tory surge has now passed its peak, we may have dodged a bullet as far as Thursday's local elections are concerned. Most people who cast a postal vote do so as soon as they receive their ballot paper, which means that many will have voted prior to Easter - and of course the Tory surge wasn't triggered until the Tuesday after Easter, when Theresa May dropped her bombshell about a snap general election. So if postal voters largely voted before the surge, and everyone else votes after the surge has receded, we could end up with a pretty decent result.
* * *
When the Sunday Times commission full-scale Scottish polls from Panelbase, they have an odd habit of holding back some of the supplementary results for a full week. Accordingly, we now have some more details from last week's poll, and they're pretty encouraging from a pro-independence point of view. Although (as we already knew) the headline independence question produced figures of Yes 45.2%, No 54.8%, it turns out that Panelbase also asked the question in a different way, with three possible options - independence within the EU, independence outside the EU, or remaining within the UK after it leaves the EU. There is a small combined majority in favour of the two pro-independence options, with 41% favouring independence within the EU, and a further 10% wanting independence outside the EU. The snag is that taking advantage of this natural majority would, on the face of it, require a kind of Schrodinger's Indy - ie. the prospect of somehow being inside and outside the EU simultaneously. But it's not impossible that there may be a way of squaring that circle in the heat of an independence referendum.
The chances of that referendum taking place have been boosted by Panelbase's finding that a majority of respondents (52%) think that the SNP would have the right to hold a vote if they win a majority of Scottish seats at the general election. That outcome is, of course, already pretty much a nailed-on certainty, regardless of whether the Tory surge recedes. It would only require the SNP to win 30 seats - and yet the unionist media want us to believe that 45 seats (a 75% super-majority) would somehow be a disastrous result for Nicola Sturgeon!
Britain-wide voting intentions (YouGov) :
Conservatives 44% (-1)
Labour 31% (+2)
Liberal Democrats 11% (+1)
UKIP 6% (-1)
SNP/Plaid Cymru 4% (-1)
It's possible (perhaps likely) that there will be some kind of reversion to the mean in the next YouGov poll, but there can be no real doubt that at least some of the narrowing of the gap is genuine. Other pollsters confirm it, with both ORB and Opinium agreeing that Labour have now broken back through the 30% barrier.
Britain-wide voting intentions (ORB) :
Conservatives 42% (-2)
Labour 31% (+2)
Liberal Democrats 10% (+2)
UKIP 8% (-2)
SNP 4% (-1)
Britain-wide voting intentions (Opinium) :
Conservatives 47% (+2)
Labour 30% (+4)
Liberal Democrats 8% (-3)
UKIP 7% (-2)
SNP 5% (+1)
Of course the support Labour have been clawing back is merely the low-hanging fruit - in other words, core voters who were perhaps never likely to desert the fold after considered reflection, but who temporarily got caught up in the hoo-ha over the calling of the snap election. It's interesting to speculate what the receding of the Tory surge is going to mean for Scottish voting intentions, because the surge we saw here seemed directly tied to the Britain-wide one. The obvious hope is that the new British trend will also be replicated north of the border, ideally with some Brexit/No supporters moving directly back to the SNP after flirting with Theresa May's "strength and stability" (ahem). Less ideally, we'll see Tory flirters switching to Labour - but thanks to the vagaries of first-past-the-post, that would actually work in the SNP's favour more than Labour's. By far the most important objective for the SNP is to increase the gap between themselves and the second-placed Tories - a healthy raw percentage share of the vote would just be the icing on the cake.
For what it's worth, the Scottish subsamples of both the ORB and Opinium polls give the SNP a very solid 20% advantage over the Tories. The YouGov datasets haven't yet been published at time of writing.
If (and it is still a very big if) we find that the Scottish Tory surge has now passed its peak, we may have dodged a bullet as far as Thursday's local elections are concerned. Most people who cast a postal vote do so as soon as they receive their ballot paper, which means that many will have voted prior to Easter - and of course the Tory surge wasn't triggered until the Tuesday after Easter, when Theresa May dropped her bombshell about a snap general election. So if postal voters largely voted before the surge, and everyone else votes after the surge has receded, we could end up with a pretty decent result.
* * *
When the Sunday Times commission full-scale Scottish polls from Panelbase, they have an odd habit of holding back some of the supplementary results for a full week. Accordingly, we now have some more details from last week's poll, and they're pretty encouraging from a pro-independence point of view. Although (as we already knew) the headline independence question produced figures of Yes 45.2%, No 54.8%, it turns out that Panelbase also asked the question in a different way, with three possible options - independence within the EU, independence outside the EU, or remaining within the UK after it leaves the EU. There is a small combined majority in favour of the two pro-independence options, with 41% favouring independence within the EU, and a further 10% wanting independence outside the EU. The snag is that taking advantage of this natural majority would, on the face of it, require a kind of Schrodinger's Indy - ie. the prospect of somehow being inside and outside the EU simultaneously. But it's not impossible that there may be a way of squaring that circle in the heat of an independence referendum.
The chances of that referendum taking place have been boosted by Panelbase's finding that a majority of respondents (52%) think that the SNP would have the right to hold a vote if they win a majority of Scottish seats at the general election. That outcome is, of course, already pretty much a nailed-on certainty, regardless of whether the Tory surge recedes. It would only require the SNP to win 30 seats - and yet the unionist media want us to believe that 45 seats (a 75% super-majority) would somehow be a disastrous result for Nicola Sturgeon!
Saturday, April 29, 2017
Your anti-Tory tactical voting guide for the 59 Scottish constituencies at the 2017 general election
As Marcia has pointed out, a lot of tactical voting at the forthcoming general election will be aimed at keeping the Tories out, or at least minimising the size of their overall majority. One handy side-benefit of the current polarisation of politics in Scotland is that it makes anti-Tory tactical voting extremely straightforward - if you live in any constituency that the Conservatives might conceivably win, the rational option is to vote SNP. No other party can stop the Tories in any of their target seats. However, where there may still be some confusion is over exactly which seats are competitive enough to make tactical voting necessary, and which seats the Tories can't realistically win.
* * *
In the hope of clearing the mists slightly, I've drawn up the following lists. Feel free to share them with the Lib Dem or Labour supporter in your life. It goes without saying that the advice on tactical voting only applies if your Number 1 objective is to stop the Tories.
* * *
* * *
There is a VERY HIGH RISK of the Tories winning the following 5 constituencies. If you live in one of them, you are advised to vote tactically for the SNP.
Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk
Dumfries and Galloway
Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale
East Renfrewshire
West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine
* * *
* * *
There is a SUBSTANTIAL RISK of the Tories winning the following 3 constituencies. If you live in one of them, you are advised to vote tactically for the SNP.
Aberdeen South
Moray
Moray
Perth and North Perthshire
* * *
* * *
There is a MODERATE RISK of the Tories winning the following 5 constituencies. If you live in one of them, you are advised to vote tactically for the SNP.
Angus
East Lothian
Edinburgh South
Edinburgh South
Edinburgh South-West
Stirling
* * *
There is an OUTSIDE CHANCE of the Tories winning the following 8 constituencies. If you live in one of them, you are advised to err on the side of caution and vote tactically for the SNP.
Argyll and Bute
Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock
Banff and Buchan
East Dunbartonshire
Edinburgh West
Edinburgh West
Gordon
North-East Fife
Ochil and South Perthshire
* * *
Ochil and South Perthshire
* * *
There is NO REALISTIC PROSPECT of the Tories winning the following 39 constituencies. If you live in one of them, there is no need to vote tactically, and you should feel free to vote for your own preferred party.
Aberdeen North
Airdrie and Shotts
Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross
Central Ayrshire
Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill
Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East
Dundee East
Dundee West
Dunfermline and West Fife
East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow
Edinburgh East
Edinburgh North and Leith
Falkirk
Glasgow Central
Glasgow East
Glasgow North
Dunfermline and West Fife
East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow
Edinburgh East
Edinburgh North and Leith
Falkirk
Glasgow Central
Glasgow East
Glasgow North
Glasgow North-East
Glasgow North-West
Glasgow South
Glasgow South-West
Glenrothes
Inverclyde
Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey
Kilmarnock and Loudoun
Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath
Lanark and Hamilton East
Linlithgow and East Falkirk
Livingston
Midlothian
Motherwell and Wishaw
Na h-Eileanan an Iar
North Ayrshire and Arran
Orkney and Shetland
Paisley and Renfrewshire North
Paisley and Renfrewshire South
Ross, Skye and Lochaber
Rutherglen and Hamilton West
West Dunbartonshire
Glasgow North-West
Glasgow South
Glasgow South-West
Glenrothes
Inverclyde
Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey
Kilmarnock and Loudoun
Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath
Lanark and Hamilton East
Linlithgow and East Falkirk
Livingston
Midlothian
Motherwell and Wishaw
Na h-Eileanan an Iar
North Ayrshire and Arran
Orkney and Shetland
Paisley and Renfrewshire North
Paisley and Renfrewshire South
Ross, Skye and Lochaber
Rutherglen and Hamilton West
West Dunbartonshire
Another reader's question on STV : How do you solve a problem like an eejit in the Western Isles?
I received another question the other day about the STV voting system for the local elections, and once again it's probably worth answering it in a public post in case anyone else has the same doubt in their mind.
"In my council ward in the Western Isles I have 6 candidates, one of whom is SNP and the remainder (supposedly) independent.
I intend to put my 1 for the SNP candidate.
Of the remainder there is one eejit whom I can't see far enough, and to whom I would like to give a resounding 6.
The others, I neither know nor care about.
Is it allowable to just vote 1 and 6 with nothing in between?"
The simple answer is "no". Although you don't have to give preferences to all of the candidates, any candidates you do give preferences to must be ranked in strict numerical order starting from 1. So if you give preferences to only two candidates, they must be ranked 1 and 2. By doing that in the example given above, you would be ranking the number 2 candidate ahead of the four candidates you have not ranked at all. The only way to rank the "eejit" bottom of the pile would be to give your top five preferences to the non-eejits. If you genuinely cannot find any way of choosing between four of the five non-eejits, your only option would be to rank them in random order.
You don't have to rank them if you don't want to - but bear in mind that if you don't, you're abstaining in certain circumstances and potentially helping the eejit to win. If you attempt to give only a first and sixth preference, the first preference will be counted but the sixth preference will be ignored (effectively as a spoilt ballot).
"In my council ward in the Western Isles I have 6 candidates, one of whom is SNP and the remainder (supposedly) independent.
I intend to put my 1 for the SNP candidate.
Of the remainder there is one eejit whom I can't see far enough, and to whom I would like to give a resounding 6.
The others, I neither know nor care about.
Is it allowable to just vote 1 and 6 with nothing in between?"
The simple answer is "no". Although you don't have to give preferences to all of the candidates, any candidates you do give preferences to must be ranked in strict numerical order starting from 1. So if you give preferences to only two candidates, they must be ranked 1 and 2. By doing that in the example given above, you would be ranking the number 2 candidate ahead of the four candidates you have not ranked at all. The only way to rank the "eejit" bottom of the pile would be to give your top five preferences to the non-eejits. If you genuinely cannot find any way of choosing between four of the five non-eejits, your only option would be to rank them in random order.
You don't have to rank them if you don't want to - but bear in mind that if you don't, you're abstaining in certain circumstances and potentially helping the eejit to win. If you attempt to give only a first and sixth preference, the first preference will be counted but the sixth preference will be ignored (effectively as a spoilt ballot).
Friday, April 28, 2017
Support for independence shoots back up in crucial YouGov poll
Tonight brings word of YouGov's first full-scale Scottish poll since Theresa May called the snap general election, and it provides tremendous reassurance on the independence question. After two consecutive YouGov polls that have had the Yes camp below the 45% achieved in the 2014 referendum, something approaching normal service has been resumed.
Should Scotland be an independent country?
Yes 45% (+2)
No 55% (-2)
As ever, it's worth bearing in mind that YouGov probably haven't interviewed 16 and 17 year olds, so even assuming their methodology is otherwise sound, the 45% for Yes could conceivably be a slight underestimate.
We've now had five different polling firms report on independence in April, and four of them have shown some sort of movement towards Yes (although it was only a trivial 0.1% swing in the case of Survation). The increase is so small in each poll that the pattern may just be coincidence, but the important thing is that there is absolutely no corroboration for the Kantar/TNS findings suggesting there has been a dramatic drop in the Yes vote. That poll sticks out like a sore thumb to an even greater extent now.
With depressing predictability, a heavy dose of spin is being applied to the YouGov poll tonight by unionist propagandists in the mainstream media - a graphic has been put out with the title "Losing Ground". It's quite true that the No side appears to be losing ground, but I suspect that's not what they meant. I'm sure it makes some kind of weird sense in their own heads.
Admittedly, there is less good news on Westminster voting intentions, where the SNP have slipped to an unusually low 41%. However, the Tories have failed to make the type of breakthrough suggested by Panelbase recently, leaving Nicola Sturgeon's party still holding a commanding lead.
Westminster voting intention (YouGov) :
SNP 41%
Conservatives 28%
Labour 18%
Liberal Democrats 7%
Greens 3%
UKIP 2%
That's quite an odd set of numbers, because other polls have implied that the SNP are basically losing support direct to the Tories, but YouGov seem to be suggesting that some of the support has gone elsewhere. If you'd told me in advance that the SNP were going to be as low as 41%, I would have expected the Tories to be in the thirties. At the end of the day, the lead of the first-placed party over the second-placed party is the most important thing in any first-past-the-post election, so we can draw considerable comfort from the 13% gap - and also from the 3% support for the Greens, some of which may find its way to the SNP by polling day (partly for tactical reasons, and partly because the Greens won't be standing in all constituencies).
* * *
SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS
Should Scotland be an independent country?
Yes 46.0% (+0.3)
No 54.0% (-0.3)
(The Poll of Polls on independence is based on a rolling average of the most recent poll from each firm that has reported at least once within the last three months. The firms included in the current sample are Panelbase, BMG, Ipsos-Mori, YouGov, Kantar/TNS and Survation.)
Westminster voting intentions :
SNP 42.8% (-0.8)
Conservatives 29.3% (-1.1)
Labour 16.5% (+1.2)
Liberal Democrats 7.0% (n/c)
(The Poll of Polls for Westminster voting intentions uses the Scottish subsamples from all GB-wide polls that have been conducted entirely within the last seven days and for which datasets have been provided, and also all full-scale Scottish polls that have been conducted at least partly within the last seven days. Full-scale polls are given ten times the weighting of subsamples.)
Should Scotland be an independent country?
Yes 45% (+2)
No 55% (-2)
As ever, it's worth bearing in mind that YouGov probably haven't interviewed 16 and 17 year olds, so even assuming their methodology is otherwise sound, the 45% for Yes could conceivably be a slight underestimate.
We've now had five different polling firms report on independence in April, and four of them have shown some sort of movement towards Yes (although it was only a trivial 0.1% swing in the case of Survation). The increase is so small in each poll that the pattern may just be coincidence, but the important thing is that there is absolutely no corroboration for the Kantar/TNS findings suggesting there has been a dramatic drop in the Yes vote. That poll sticks out like a sore thumb to an even greater extent now.
With depressing predictability, a heavy dose of spin is being applied to the YouGov poll tonight by unionist propagandists in the mainstream media - a graphic has been put out with the title "Losing Ground". It's quite true that the No side appears to be losing ground, but I suspect that's not what they meant. I'm sure it makes some kind of weird sense in their own heads.
Admittedly, there is less good news on Westminster voting intentions, where the SNP have slipped to an unusually low 41%. However, the Tories have failed to make the type of breakthrough suggested by Panelbase recently, leaving Nicola Sturgeon's party still holding a commanding lead.
Westminster voting intention (YouGov) :
SNP 41%
Conservatives 28%
Labour 18%
Liberal Democrats 7%
Greens 3%
UKIP 2%
That's quite an odd set of numbers, because other polls have implied that the SNP are basically losing support direct to the Tories, but YouGov seem to be suggesting that some of the support has gone elsewhere. If you'd told me in advance that the SNP were going to be as low as 41%, I would have expected the Tories to be in the thirties. At the end of the day, the lead of the first-placed party over the second-placed party is the most important thing in any first-past-the-post election, so we can draw considerable comfort from the 13% gap - and also from the 3% support for the Greens, some of which may find its way to the SNP by polling day (partly for tactical reasons, and partly because the Greens won't be standing in all constituencies).
* * *
SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS
Should Scotland be an independent country?
Yes 46.0% (+0.3)
No 54.0% (-0.3)
(The Poll of Polls on independence is based on a rolling average of the most recent poll from each firm that has reported at least once within the last three months. The firms included in the current sample are Panelbase, BMG, Ipsos-Mori, YouGov, Kantar/TNS and Survation.)
Westminster voting intentions :
SNP 42.8% (-0.8)
Conservatives 29.3% (-1.1)
Labour 16.5% (+1.2)
Liberal Democrats 7.0% (n/c)
(The Poll of Polls for Westminster voting intentions uses the Scottish subsamples from all GB-wide polls that have been conducted entirely within the last seven days and for which datasets have been provided, and also all full-scale Scottish polls that have been conducted at least partly within the last seven days. Full-scale polls are given ten times the weighting of subsamples.)
Wednesday, April 26, 2017
The ghost of #Pounds4McDougallGate
I must admit I burst out laughing when I heard that Blair McDougall is going to be Labour's general election candidate in East Renfrewshire, but once I regained my composure I realised that this is a symptom of a major dilemma for the unionist camp. There's no doubt that the SNP are vulnerable in East Renfrewshire, but they'll start looking a hell of a lot less vulnerable if the Labour/Tory vote is split right down the middle. Budding unionist tactical voters can't do much until they work out who the real challenger is, and that's far from clear at the moment. The political history of the area, taken in combination with current opinion polls, would suggest the seat ought to be a straight fight between SNP and Tory, and that Labour's resilience in 2015 was a one-off due to Tories temporarily lending their support to Jim Murphy on a mass scale. And yet anyone 'tactically' voting for the Tories this time will have to take a leap of faith and assume that natural Tory voters won't be coaxed by the electrifyingly charismatic McDougall and his trusty Lib Dem-style bar-charts into believing that "only Labour can beat the SNP here". There will be a similar dilemma in East Dunbartonshire, where diehard unionists will have to guess whether Jo Swinson's candidacy means there will not be the mass-switch from Lib Dem to Tory that you might otherwise expect in an area with such a strong Tory tradition.
* * *
SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS
The second update of our Poll of Polls for Scottish voting intentions at the general election is based on two full-scale Scottish polls (from Panelbase and Survation), and eight subsamples (two from ICM, one from Ipsos-Mori, one from Panelbase, one from ComRes, one from Survation, one from Opinium and one from YouGov). The GB-wide poll from Kantar/TNS has had to be excluded because no geographical breakdown was provided.
SNP 43.6% (-0.7)
Conservatives 30.4% (+6.1)
Labour 15.3% (-0.7)
Liberal Democrats 7.0% (+0.7)
(The Poll of Polls uses the Scottish subsamples from all GB-wide polls that have been conducted entirely within the last seven days and for which datasets have been provided, and also all full-scale Scottish polls that have been conducted at least partly within the last seven days. Full-scale polls are given ten times the weighting of subsamples.)
* * *
SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS
The second update of our Poll of Polls for Scottish voting intentions at the general election is based on two full-scale Scottish polls (from Panelbase and Survation), and eight subsamples (two from ICM, one from Ipsos-Mori, one from Panelbase, one from ComRes, one from Survation, one from Opinium and one from YouGov). The GB-wide poll from Kantar/TNS has had to be excluded because no geographical breakdown was provided.
SNP 43.6% (-0.7)
Conservatives 30.4% (+6.1)
Labour 15.3% (-0.7)
Liberal Democrats 7.0% (+0.7)
(The Poll of Polls uses the Scottish subsamples from all GB-wide polls that have been conducted entirely within the last seven days and for which datasets have been provided, and also all full-scale Scottish polls that have been conducted at least partly within the last seven days. Full-scale polls are given ten times the weighting of subsamples.)
Tuesday, April 25, 2017
Drama as No-friendly TNS poll finds half of the Scottish public want an independence referendum
I've been having a look at the newly-released datasets from TNS to see if there is any potential explanation (other than the obvious one of data collection method) for why they are contradicting three other pollsters in showing a big swing to No. What leaps out at me are the weightings for recalled Holyrood vote, and the highly unusual way TNS treat respondents who say they didn't cast a vote last year. Most pollsters who weight by recalled vote do not try to upweight abstainers until they reflect the actual abstention rate. There are two very good reasons for that approach : a) people are embarrassed to admit that they didn't vote, meaning a significant proportion will lie and claim they did turn out, and b) people who do openly admit they didn't vote are particularly unlikely to vote again in future elections anyway.
That being the case, you'll quickly spot the problem in the fact that only 27% of the unweighted TNS sample either said they didn't vote last year or can't remember how they voted, and that TNS decided to massively upweight that group to 42%. It looks highly likely that disproportionate weight has been given to a hard-core of non-voters. That doesn't explain all of the swing to No by any means - there is movement in that direction almost across the board among voters for most parties. But the swing among abstainers from last year is very large - they've gone from being virtually split down the middle in the last TNS poll to being in favour of No this time by a 21-point margin. The massive upweighting will obviously have artificially magnified the effect of that.
The biggest downweighting on the recalled vote is among people who say they voted SNP - 38% of the unweighted sample were SNP voters, and they were scaled down to count as just 27%. That obviously has a significant detrimental effect on the reported Yes vote. It's not unreasonable to speculate that 'embarrassed abstainers' who falsely claim to have voted last year may have defaulted to saying they voted for the winning party, so while it's possible that TNS may have interviewed too many SNP voters by chance, it's also possible that this group has been downweighted too much, leading to distorted headline numbers.
In addition, there's a very familiar problem with respondents who recall voting for an "other" party - meaning a party other than the SNP, Tories, Lib Dems or Labour. This small group often ends up being very sharply downweighted, because people are asked how they voted on the constituency ballot, but instead find themselves recalling their vote for the Greens or UKIP on the list. In the new poll, this had led to them being scaled down from 3.4% of the raw sample to count as just 0.6%. It's blindingly obvious that TNS aren't giving them sufficient weight, and as it happens, they are the only group that didn't show any movement to No at all. They also broke only very marginally for No overall. If there had been a more realistic target figure for "others" to take account of the confusion between the constituency and list vote, this factor alone could conceivably have slightly reduced the reported swing to No.
You'll have seen a lot of hysterical coverage today about how this poll supposedly shows that the public don't want an independence referendum. You probably won't faint with amazement to discover that it shows no such thing. Excluding Don't Knows, 49% of respondents chose one of the four pro-referendum options provided by TNS, and 51% chose the sole anti-referendum option provided. That's within the margin of error, so must be regarded as a 'statistical tie', and is strikingly similar to the findings of recent Panelbase polls which have also shown voters split down the middle. It's also worth pointing out that if the TNS poll does turn out to be a rogue poll with too many No voters in the sample, the 49% in favour of holding a referendum is likely to be an underestimate.
That being the case, you'll quickly spot the problem in the fact that only 27% of the unweighted TNS sample either said they didn't vote last year or can't remember how they voted, and that TNS decided to massively upweight that group to 42%. It looks highly likely that disproportionate weight has been given to a hard-core of non-voters. That doesn't explain all of the swing to No by any means - there is movement in that direction almost across the board among voters for most parties. But the swing among abstainers from last year is very large - they've gone from being virtually split down the middle in the last TNS poll to being in favour of No this time by a 21-point margin. The massive upweighting will obviously have artificially magnified the effect of that.
The biggest downweighting on the recalled vote is among people who say they voted SNP - 38% of the unweighted sample were SNP voters, and they were scaled down to count as just 27%. That obviously has a significant detrimental effect on the reported Yes vote. It's not unreasonable to speculate that 'embarrassed abstainers' who falsely claim to have voted last year may have defaulted to saying they voted for the winning party, so while it's possible that TNS may have interviewed too many SNP voters by chance, it's also possible that this group has been downweighted too much, leading to distorted headline numbers.
In addition, there's a very familiar problem with respondents who recall voting for an "other" party - meaning a party other than the SNP, Tories, Lib Dems or Labour. This small group often ends up being very sharply downweighted, because people are asked how they voted on the constituency ballot, but instead find themselves recalling their vote for the Greens or UKIP on the list. In the new poll, this had led to them being scaled down from 3.4% of the raw sample to count as just 0.6%. It's blindingly obvious that TNS aren't giving them sufficient weight, and as it happens, they are the only group that didn't show any movement to No at all. They also broke only very marginally for No overall. If there had been a more realistic target figure for "others" to take account of the confusion between the constituency and list vote, this factor alone could conceivably have slightly reduced the reported swing to No.
You'll have seen a lot of hysterical coverage today about how this poll supposedly shows that the public don't want an independence referendum. You probably won't faint with amazement to discover that it shows no such thing. Excluding Don't Knows, 49% of respondents chose one of the four pro-referendum options provided by TNS, and 51% chose the sole anti-referendum option provided. That's within the margin of error, so must be regarded as a 'statistical tie', and is strikingly similar to the findings of recent Panelbase polls which have also shown voters split down the middle. It's also worth pointing out that if the TNS poll does turn out to be a rogue poll with too many No voters in the sample, the 49% in favour of holding a referendum is likely to be an underestimate.
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