New TNS BMRB and Survation Scottish polls
Following the intervention of George Osborne into the debate over Scottish independence and what currency an independent Scotland might use there has been an obvious interest in the next Scottish polls and what they might show. Will it have closed or widened the gap, or made no difference? Today there are two new Scottish polls asking about the referendum, sadly neither quite answer the question.
To get the less interesting one out of the way first, TNS BMRB have a "new" Scottish referendum poll, but the fieldwork was actually conducted between the 28th January and 6th February (I can only assume that the long time scale is because the poll was conducted face-to-face... though even then, the fieldwork was completed a fortnight ago). The figures in TNS's poll are YES 29%, NO 42%, 29% don't know - entirely unchanged from their previous poll in mid-January. Given the fieldwork was conducted prior to Osborne's intervention though, this clearly doesn't answer the question.
More relevant is a new Survation poll in the Daily Mail. This was conducted on Monday and Tuesday, so after Osborne's intervention and at the time Alex Salmond was actively responding. Topline figures there are YES 38%, NO 47%, Don't know 16%. Survation's previous poll was showing YES on 32%, NO on 52%, so prima facie it looks as though there has been a significant shift towards YES. But there's a caveat - last month Survation weighted their data by recalled 2010 vote, this month they've weighted by 2011 Holyrood vote. According to John Curtice Survation's weighting last month knocked about five points off of Yes, their new weighting has not, raising the possibility that the difference could just be down to weighting. Realistically its not that simple - there is a random element in sampling, one sample will not be the same as the next and, therefore, weighting will have a different effect from one poll to the next, and it seems like a big difference to all be down to weighting to a different election. All we can really be confident in saying is that the two polls are not really comparable, so we should probably hold off on judgement - there are sure to be some more Scottish polls along soon. The tabs should be up on Survation's site in about half an hour.
Scottish independence referendum polls so far are here.
