Wings Over Scotland | Pick Your Poison

At the end of last year we noted the unusual and persistent levels of divergence in Scottish political polling. As polls have become much more frequent during the election campaign, nothing about that has changed. The final polls, published yesterday, are so far apart from each other that they tell us basically zip.

Analysing this mess is meaningless, so we’ll just give you some highlights.

On the constituency vote the SNP are in either the low 30s or the low 40s, either 12 points ahead of Labour, 20 points ahead of Labour, or 24 points ahead of Reform.

On the list they’re either 1 ahead of Reform, 8 ahead of them, or 13 ahead of Labour.

The Greens are either in 3rd, 4th or 6th place on the list, where they’re either 1, 2 or a whopping 12 points behind Reform. The Lib Dems are either 6th with 8%, or 4th with 12% (which is a non-trivial 50% more, arithmetic lovers). Reform have either more than twice as much support as the Tories (22-10), or just four points more (17-13).

That 10% would likely get the Tories one list seat per region, whereas the 13% might well get them twice as many. Similar applies to the Lib Dems, whose low of 8% definitely wouldn’t get them more than one seat per region, but whose high of 12% could – with luck and a following wind – just about double that.

The Greens’ lowest list score (10%) would garner one seat per region, but their highest (17%) would all but guarantee two per region and could conceivably get them as many as three per region. The same applies to Labour, whose lowest is 12% and highest is 19%, but who have a better chance of winning constituency seats.

(The number of Green list seats is quite likely to determine whether there’s a pro-indy majority or not, so a couple of percentage points either way could be crucial in terms of the ultimate shape of the government, though it’ll make sod-all difference in terms of independence. The SNP-Labour coalition might yet happen.)

And of course, it depends on whose voters, if anyone’s, are most motivated to turn out, and how many of the 20% who still say they’re undecided make their minds up, and whether it rains or not, and the price of cheese and whether Venus is rising in Uranus. Frankly, our dears, we haven’t got a scooby.

So we’re having the day off, and we’ll see you tomorrow for the results. Your guess, at this stage, is as good as ours.