Beware the Herald's reporting of a "new" independence poll - the fieldwork is actually several weeks out of date (although it still shows a small Yes lead)A Scot Goes Pop reader has alerted me to the fact that the Herald is reporting a "new" YouGov poll on independence. I'll give you the results for the sake of completeness, but the crucial point here is that the fieldwork took place weeks ago, between the 22nd and 25th of November, which means it predates the run of four polls since the Supreme Court ruling showing a clear pro-independence majority. The Herald's report says that the fieldwork "took in" the moment of the Supreme Court ruling on the 23rd, which is true, but it must always be remembered that most respondents to online polls reply to the interview request as soon as they receive it. So the bulk of this poll is likely to have been carried out on the 22nd, before anyone knew that the Supreme Court was going to rule that Scotland is a prisoner in a non-voluntary union.
Should Scotland be an independent country? (YouGov / Scottish Election Survey, 22nd-25th November 2022)
Yes 50.2%
No 49.8%
It's extremely unusual in this day and age for polls to be rounded to one decimal place, but I'm just giving you the results exactly as the Herald have published them. They even give percentage changes rounded to one decimal place from the previous poll for the Scottish Election Study, showing a 2.6% boost for Yes since August.
Obviously rounded to whole numbers this is a 50/50 result, but before Don't Knows are excluded, Yes have a slim lead of 43% to 42%. So it's in the eye of the beholder whether this is a Yes-majority poll or not. If you take the view that it is, it means we now have six polls in a row, with fieldwork stretching all the way back to mid-October, showing a pro-independence majority.
The emphasis the Herald are placing on supposedly poor voting intention results from the poll for the SNP really is a complete red herring, given we have a much more up-to-date poll from YouGov that is more favourable to the SNP.
UPDATE: Having done some more checking, it turns out to my surprise that only around one-third of the fieldwork for the poll was completed before the Supreme Court ruling. However, there are two caveats to put on that. Firstly, some of the respondents who took part after the ruling will have done so just afterwards and may not have caught up with the news yet. And secondly, the 'before and after' results have been published from the poll, which show - as expected - that the Yes vote did indeed rise immediately after the ruling. Among the one-third of respondents who took part before the ruling, there was a No lead of three points (after weighting but before the exclusion of Don't Knows), compared to a Yes lead of two points among the two-thirds of respondents who took part after the ruling. There's an astoundingly biased and disingenuous write-up of the poll on the Scottish Election Study website which dismisses the difference between the two sections of the sample as statistically insignificant, and concludes that any impact from the court judgement on public opinion must have been extremely minor. This conveniently ignores the elephant in the room - namely that we've had another four polls since this one, all of which pretty conclusively confirm that Yes has received a significant boost as a result of the ruling.
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Source: Beware the Herald's reporting of a "new" independence poll - the fieldwork is actually several weeks out of date (although it still shows a small Yes lead) (//)