YouGov/Sun Scottish poll

Kevin Schofield at the Sun has just tweeted out the latest YouGov Scottish polling from tomorrow morning's Sun (£). Topline figures are YES 35%, NO 55%. Without don't knows it works out at YES 39%, NO 61%. The fieldwork for the poll straddled the debate - just over half took place pre-debate.

39/61 is exactly the same as the last Scottish YouGov poll, but it isn't directly comparable. There are two slight changes in YouGov's Scottish methodology since the previous poll. The first is that the sample is extended to include 16 and 17 year olds - though this didn't actually make any difference to the result.

The second is that YouGov have added an extra weighting variable, weighting according to people's country of birth. For some reason raw samples seem to contain too many respondents who were born in England, and English born people are more likely to vote NO (Panelbase found the same, and also adopted place of birth as an extra weighting variable in their latest poll). This additional weight does makes a slight difference to final result, making the results slightly more "YES". Under the old weighting scheme the results would have been YES 38%, NO 62%, a slight shift towards NO.