Conservative polling in Scotland
There is a headline in Scotland on Sunday of "Scots Tories set to gain new seats". The story underneath is based on polling conducted by ORB for the Conservative party in the party's 11 target seats (their one current seat, and ten they hope to gain). I always urge caution with polls commissioned by political parties - while the polling companies are all reputable outfits who are not going to produce dodgy figures, the interpretation of those figures by the political parties is a different matter.
We haven't seen the full tables from ORB yet, so we can't see whether there was anything strange about the questions, but at first glance the results seem plausible. The poll found just under 60% of people expected Cameron to become Prime Minister after the election, which seems perfectly reasonable given the ORB poll for the whole of Scotland found 67% expected the Conservatives to win the election.
The poll also found 54% of respondents thought that David Cameron was a better leader than Gordon Brown on 46%. While that appears good for the Conservatives, I'd add some caveats. Firstly, while we haven't seen the tables yet 54+46=100 - so it was either a forced choice question, and doesn't necessarily reflect any great enthusiasm for David Cameron, or the figures are excluding an unknown quantity of don't knows and fewer than 54% of respondents actually gave a positive response about David Cameron. Neither would a straight choice between the Conservative leader and Labour leader necessarily reflect voting intention - I'm sure many SNP and Liberal Democrat supporters will have an opinion on whether Cameron or Brown are more capable leaders, but it won't stop them voting SNP or Liberal Democrat - and half of the 10 Scottish seats the Conservatives hope to gain are currently held by the Lib Dems or SNP.
With that in mind, the finding that 73% of respondents thought that Labour looked "tired and failing" shouldn't be a great surprise - Labour only got 29% of the vote in these seats in 2005 anyway. The most interesting statement is that 53% of respondents agreed that "it would be good for Scotland if there were more Conservative MPs from Scotland elected at the next general election" - it'll be interesting to see what question was actually asked.
The Scotland on Sunday article said that the Conservatives claimed the poll showed they had a real chance of winning. Apart from that interesting last question that would appear to show some latent Conservative support, it really doesn't. However much people think that more Conservative MPs would be good, or that David Cameron would be better than Gordon Brown, the Conservatives won't get any more MPs in Scotland without more votes (and to be fair to the Conservatives, that seems to be largely the message that Peter Duncan is putting across in his comments in the piece).
Labour's response to the poll was that the Conservatives had failed to publish details on how people would actually vote, and they've got something of a point. It may well be that the poll didn't include a voting intention question, so the call to publish them may well be just empty posturing - but at the end of the day, the one question that would actually have shown whether or not the Conservatives were on the way to winning new seats in Scotland would have been a voting intention question, and it's conspicious by its absence.
UPDATE: The tables are now up on ORB's website.
