Scottish Poll Shows Labour Closing Gap With SNP
A new poll from the Scottish Election Study and YouGov has been released today, suggesting a striking shift in Scottish voting intention. It puts the SNP on 38% (-4) to Labour's 35% (+7) - a significant 5.5 point swing to Labour from the SNP. Naturally, this would carry major implications for national electoral calculations. A 3% SNP lead is the smallest since 2014...
To make the picture more dramatic, the poll was conducted from 10th to 15th February - before Nicola Sturgeon's resignation. As with all such dramatic polls, it should be taken with at least a pinch of salt.
It is important to state that this is just one poll showing a dramatic result and it should be treated with caution. As always, it could be an outlier, and it's too early to establish a pattern. Survation, for one, has a poll that paints a contradictory picture. Although it was conducted before the Scottish Opinion Monitor, it gives the SNP a 13% lead over Labour.
Events in Scottish politics have moved quickly, and will likely continue to do so, so it's worth waiting until things settle to cast any judgements. The relative infrequency of Scottish polling only reinforces this.
To add further cause for caution, there doesn't seem to be much evidence of such a Labour revival in Scotland in subsamples of national polls. Both Omnisis and Redfield & Wilton do suggest a smaller SNP lead - of 7% - though there is limited evidence of a shift in the past week. Meanwhile, PeoplePolling maintains a 16% SNP lead and Deltapoll puts it at 21%. Although going off such small samples is by no means a science.
A Labour revival in Scotland would shift the electoral map significantly - and clearly boosts Labour's prospects of an election win - as Rob Ford has examined on his Substack. Keir Starmer should be watching coming releases of Scottish polls with interest.
