There's now a real chance that the polling average for 2022 will show the second highest pro-independence vote in any calendar year - and an outside chance it will show an outright Yes majority for only the second time everOne of the side-benefits of the (failed) attempts by Stuart Campbell and his most fanatical followers to bully me into silence a few weeks ago was that I ended up calculating the average Yes support in every calendar year since 2016. It took me forever, but the advantage is that I now have those figures if I need them in future, and I'll never have to calculate them again - except, of course, for the 2022 figure, which was provisional. Since I made the calculation, there have been two more polls, both showing an outright Yes majority, which means the 2022 average for Yes has nudged up slightly. Here is the updated list of averages...
Average yearly support for independence in conventional opinion polling:
2016: 47.7%
2017: 45.3%
2018: 45.5%
2019: 47.6%
2020: 53.0%
2021: 49.6%
2022: 49.3%
So it really just depends on whether we see any more independence polls over the remaining three-and-a-bit weeks of the year, and also whether the Yes majority we've seen in the last three polls holds up. Two or three more polls with a Yes lead could see the 2022 average overtaking 2021, and a proper flurry of polls all showing the same thing could mean 2022 joining 2020 as one of two calendar years in which the polling average has shown an outright pro-indy majority.
Usually Christmas is a quiet time for polls, but I distinctly remember blogging about a new poll late at night on Christmas Day last year (it was in one of the Boxing Day papers). So who knows. The bombshell Ipsos poll might yet motivate one or two newspapers to see if another firm would replicate the result over the next few weeks.
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