ALBA - Unofficial Forum

Although it often feels like Labour voters from last July have moved to Reform in their droves, according to the Techne data tables only 6% have actually done so.  There have been slightly greater movements to the Tories (9%), to the Liberal Democrats (9%) and to the Greens (8%).  The mind boggles as to what the effect would be if Reform do start breaking through with Labour voters to a greater extent.

22% isn't a new post-election low for Labour with Find Out Now, but it does equal the previous low.  Bang in line with the Techne poll, the data tables show that Labour have lost only 6% of their 2024 voters direct to Reform, although here the biggest slippage has been to the Greens (13%) - logical enough in the light of the anger about Kendall's announcement.

Would the Find Out Now numbers actually produce an overall Reform majority?  Maybe, although the projection will vary a bit depending on the model you use.  I put the percentages into the Electoral Calculus model, and it did produce a Reform majority but not by a safe margin (the target for a majority is 326 seats) -

That would be quite something, wouldn't it - without even moving out of fourth place, the SNP would have overtaken the Tories UK-wide!

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I received a sort of marketing email a few days ago asking me to give a mention to an updated Top 100 ranking of Scottish blogs of all types - ie. not just political blogs.  I'm happy enough to do that, because it has Scot Goes Pop in a very healthy seventh place - and in fact the top four places are all taken by newspaper feeds, so in terms of 'real' blogs, Scot Goes Pop is actually in third place.  I've no idea what the criteria for the ranking is - there are various metrics mentioned, but none of them seem to tally very precisely with the ranking itself.  

I've been receiving these emails periodically for about eight years, and they always remind me of being in Ibiza, because that's where I was when I got the first one in September 2017.  I checked back and Scot Goes Pop was in eleventh place back then, so there's been some progress in line with the recent increase in popularity shown by Stuart Campbell's favourite comparison site.  (Incidentally, the trend shown by that site has been accelerating - since I last mentioned it, the 28-day number of visits for Scot Goes Pop has increased from 60,000 to 72,000, while Wings' visits have dropped to just under 200,000.  Stuart used to boast about having ten times as many visits as Scot Goes Pop, which I doubt was ever really true, but the ratio has now dipped to less than 3-1.)

It's worth looking through the whole Top 100 ranking, because you'll find lots of interesting blogs of all types that you probably never knew existed.  It answers the oft-asked question "where are all the women bloggers?" - as you can see, they're out there in big numbers, but they just don't seem to be writing about politics.  There are travel blogs, fashion blogs, theatre blogs, lifestyle blogs, etc, etc.