More thoughts on the prospects for an SNP overall majority in the light of the Scot Goes Pop / Find Out Now pollJust to allow you to make up your own minds, I thought I'd draw your attention to the fact that the Stats for Lefties account picked up on the Scot Goes Pop / Find Out Now poll yesterday, and produced their own seats projection from it that is radically different from the one I
published on Wednesday night:
SNP 68
Greens 18
Reform UK 15
Liberal Democrats 10
Labour 10
Conservatives 8
That would be a single-party SNP overall majority, whereas my projection has the SNP six seats short of a majority on 59. I've been saying for months (and I really have been saying this for months) that the Stats for Lefties projection model always seems to be overly optimistic for the SNP, and often produces an overall majority when other models do not. During the debate in the autumn about whether the SNP should adopt the target of an overall majority, I was very concerned that some of the proponents of the idea were using the Stats for Lefties projections to give the impression that a majority was a lot more likely than was really the case.
However, there are two caveats this time around. As I said myself the other night, in the real world the Scot Goes Pop / Find Out Now poll would probably produce about 63 SNP seats (almost a majority but not quite), because most of the 12% of people who said they would vote Green on the constituency ballot will not be able to do so, and a lot of them will actually vote SNP. So if the Stats for Lefties projection is making some sort of common sense adjustment to the constituency numbers to take account of that, it might not be quite so far out.
And secondly, even without any adjustment, the constituency vote shares from the poll are actually better for the SNP than the Find Out Now MRP poll from last month. The MRP poll had the SNP on 34% of the vote and gave them a 16-point lead over the second placed party (Labour). The Scot Goes Pop poll has the SNP on 35% and gives them a 19-point lead over the second-placed party (Reform UK). The MRP poll, once the individual constituency-level projections were totted up, gave the SNP an overall majority - it was surprising that it showed that, but it did. So if you think the projection method that was used in that MRP poll was sound, then yes, the Scot Goes Pop poll probably would point to an SNP overall majority, even before you take into account the issue of the Greens on the constituency ballot.
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Source: More thoughts on the prospects for an SNP overall majority in the light of the Scot Goes Pop / Find Out Now poll (//)