There was an attempted comment on the blog a few days ago which I didn't let through because it contained a potentially offensive word. However it asked me a question which I think I was intended to take seriously: how many council seats do I expect the SNP to lose to the unionist parties in May due to the GRA reform controversy? Well, if we're talking about net losses, the answer is pretty straightforward: it's zero. On the basis of the available opinion poll evidence, the SNP should actually be on course for substantial net gains. Although by now it's beyond all credible dispute that the Scottish public are overwhelmingly opposed to the proposed GRA reform (multiple recent polls all tell the same story), the issue doesn't seem to be shifting many votes as of yet, and that's unlikely to change by May unless the Scottish Government are strategically naive enough to bring matters to a head before polling day.
Nevertheless, there is still a health warning to be put on any predictions about the election result, given that the SNP vastly underperformed expectations at the last local elections in May 2017 by essentially flatlining in the low 30s. Because that phenomenon has never been adequately explained, ie. because we don't have a clue why it happened, it's impossible to exclude the possibility that something similar could happen again. It remains the case that the only poll thus far with a voting intention question specifically about the 2022 local elections is the Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll from October, which had the SNP on 45%, the Tories on 22% and Labour on 21%. But we can already say with near-certainty that the real result won't look quite like that, because the poll didn't pick up the likely significant percentage vote for independent candidates. Adding a generic 'independents' option to polls wouldn't be any kind of silver bullet, because hardly anyone is a generic supporter of independent candidates - unless the menu of options somehow specifies who the independent candidates will be in each respondent's own ward, the vote share any poll reports for independents is going to be pretty meaningless. In any case, the wildcard factor of the independents cannot explain the opinion poll failure from five years ago, because unionist parties are no less likely than the SNP to leak votes to independents.
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