A sneak preview of what to expect from the latest Scot Goes Pop opinion poll result, related to the SNP leadership election which reaches its climax tomorrow. You can find the poll results when they're published at: scotgoespop.blogspot.com

An extremely elusive waterfall near Cumbernauld, apparently known by some as the Castlecary Falls.

Late last night, I was accosted on Twitter by a couple of diehard Humza Yousaf supporters - one of them was being abusive, although in fairness the other was not.  Both of them were still trying to push the fantastical line of argument that it "huztae be Humza" because supposedly neither of the other candidates for leader has the numbers to be installed as First Minister by the Scottish...

We've been in a weird 'polling desert' since the Murrell scandal broke a few days ago, but at last we do have some up to date numbers.  Again, they come from polling of the general public rather than SNP members.  However, there appears to have been a YouGov poll of SNP members in the field for around a week, so we'll have to see if that eventually shows up, perhaps at the weekend.The...

That's a headline deliberately "in the style of the Daily Mail", but there's a perfectly serious point behind it, and it's one I've made a number of times before.  I thought it might be worth revisiting on the day that we're told Humza Yousaf thinks - with a certain lack of self-awareness, it has to be said - that his opponents in the leadership election might cost the SNP some of its...

There's a very big health warning to be put on this, because two other polls conducted at around the same time have failed to pick up the same trend, but nevertheless Deltapoll are indeed reporting that Labour's GB-wide lead has been slashed from 23 points to just 10 - which seems to be the smallest Labour advantage in any poll from any firm since mid-September 2022, when Liz Truss was still Prime...

I've written a few times about my fears that a Humza Yousaf win, even if it only results in him being leader for a year or two, could cause such damage to both the SNP and the independence movement that it might not be repairable by the person who replaces him. I think we're now getting to the point where this leadership campaign itself is causing enough damage that there's going to be a major...

Those of you who are on Twitter may have seen that I had a brief exchange with Pat Kane last night.  Earlier in the day, Pat had said that he couldn't understand why Ash Regan would want to cast doubt on the integrity of an electoral process she was involved in.  I thought that was an extremely peculiar remark, because it's actually very commonplace, the whole world over, for people to...

I'm going to take a brief break from covering the SNP leadership election, because I was asked two or three threads back to give an opinion on the Alba Party's claim that polling shows them to be on course to win a Holyrood list seat in the north-east region, which would probably be filled by Alex Salmond.  The claim seems to be based on the regional subsamples from the YouGov poll...

I've made a few attempts over the last four days to find the data tables from last week's Survation poll on the SNP leadership election, but I became more determined tonight when I saw John Curtice saying that it was the only poll to date with any information on second preferences.  I eventually found a link to the tables on Survation's Twitter account (there's still no link on the Survation...

one good thing about the timing of the leadership change is the new leader’s popularity will be tested in the (lesser importance) WM election at least 16 months before the (crucial) HR26 election. That way if the new leader tanks in WM GR we can punt then before HR one— Scone of Destiny (@SconeOf) March 13, 2023 If you have to go through the SNP losing half their Westminster seats just to...

I was toying with the idea of doing one of my "how the voting system works" blogposts just before the SNP leadership ballot got underway, but I began to think it was unnecessary because I had looked back at past internal elections in different parties and realised that the vast majority of members do actually rank more than one candidate.  However, our regular commenter Keaton has gone and...

Humza Yousaf was absolutely obsessed with talking about opinion poll results during the Sky News leadership debate tonight, which suggests to me he's very worried about what the polls are actually showing and is desperately trying to muddy the waters with a mixture of lies, half-truths and distortions.  Although Kate Forbes clearly came out on top in the debate, one thing that disappointed me...

My heart skipped a beat earlier, because someone left a comment saying that independence support had "fallen to 39% in a new YouGov poll".  Totally false alarm, as it turns out - that was the figure before Don't Knows were excluded.  The headline numbers are actually Yes 46%, No 54%, which bearing in mind that YouGov are generally on the No-friendly end of the spectrum, suggests that...

Before I start, one or two people asked me yesterday if any media outlets had picked up on the new Scot Goes Pop / Panelbase poll showing that Kate Forbes has significantly extended her lead with the general public.  It took a little while, but quite a few newspaper websites started reporting the poll this afternoon, including The Independent, The National, The Journal (Ireland) and most...

Hot on the heels of last night's remarkable seventh Scot Goes Pop opinion poll (and I haven't even finished giving you the results of that one yet), I have an eighth for you.  Don't expect this sequence of events to make any logical sense, because it doesn't make sense, but it's happening anyway.  I commissioned Panelbase to conduct this new poll, and the question I'm releasing today...

Find out the results of this new poll very shortly at Scot Goes Pop: scotgoespop blogspot.com

For the seventh Scot Goes Pop opinion poll of voters in Scotland, I commissioned a different polling company from the two I've commissioned before.  Find Out Now are relative newcomers to political polling, but they're full members of the British Polling Council, and I believe this is already the fourth Scottish independence poll they've conducted.  And given the challenging...