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Updated Scotland poll tracker, accounting for recent polling.

SNP 1 short of a majority.

Pro-independence majority of 23.

Seats (+/- 2021)

SNP: 64 (nc)
Lab: 17 (-5)
Ref: 16 (+16)
Grn: 12 (+4)
LD: 10 (+6)
Con: 10 (-21)

1/2

Excellent news given I need to be in Hong Kong in July for a wedding and, more importantly, get my infant daughter back home afterwards...

It's not a comparison in that sense, it's pointing out that Jobs For The Boys is the norm.

Maybe also the Americafication of our political class...

EC's are political, but they're also appointees. The reason Ministers aren't vetted in the same way is their democratic legitimacy.

One reason I think the political class - those who aren't licking their lips at the prospect of bringing down Starmer - are struggling with this stuff is that they do think this is normal behaviour. Shunting an inconvenient but loyal colleague into a plum job that's out of the way is the done thing.

Lots of folks up in arms about the effort to get Matthew Doyle a plum FCDO job, quite rightly.

Honest question - because I was 11 at the time - was there similar scrutiny of the actual appointment of Mandelson as a European Commissioner? Because that was also giving a mate a soft landing.

Ballot Box Scotland exclusive poll *tomorrow*!

There hasn't been any constituency-level polling at all.

This includes the JLP and MiC MRP figures, the national VI figures anyway - which weren't wild.

I just don't see how they're getting the projections they're getting unless their models assume a totally different electorate from the one we have...

Constituency vote (+/- 2021):

SNP: 35.6% (-12.1)
Lab: 17.6% (-4.9)
Ref: 17% (+17)
Con: 10.2% (-11.7)
LD: 9.9% (+2.9)
Grn: 7.2% (+5.9)

List vote (+/- 2021):

SNP: 29.4% (-11)
Ref: 17.1% (+16.9)
Lab: 16.3% (-1.6)
Grn: 12.9% (+4.8)
Con: 11.1% (-12.4)
LD: 9.7% (+4.7)

2/2

Updated Scotland poll tracker, accounting for recent polling.

SNP 1 short of a majority.

Pro-independence majority of 23.

Seats (+/- 2021)

SNP: 64 (nc)
Lab: 17 (-5)
Ref: 16 (+16)
Grn: 12 (+4)
LD: 10 (+6)
Con: 10 (-21)

1/2

🚨NEW HISTORIC LOW 🚨 - net economic optimism in Britain has fallen to the lowest levels ever recorded since Ipsos began collecting this data in 1978.

It's not something covered by the BPC (whose rules amount to being transparent, which JLP were), and I don't know if they're MRS members, but that's also voluntary. As long as private sector clients keep commissioning them, they'll be fine.

...so a much bigger decline in turnout might be on the cards.

Holyrood elections have indeed always had a lower turnout than the most recent general election, which would suggest that turnout would fall below 59.2% next month. That'd be a decline of 4.3pts at least.

2021 had record turnout for a Holyrood election, though, up 7.7pts on the previous record...

...and 4) if the above don't apply, or are cancelling out, the main governing party.

1 applies, benefitting Reform UK and the Greens. 2 doesn't apply, harming Labour. 3 applies to the SNP and Greens.

So I'd suggest that low turnout should primarily benefit the SNP, Reform, and the Greens.

In light of those observations, who should benefit from low turnout?

1) Anti-establishment parties when there's a strong anti-politics sentiment.
2) Challenger parties when there's a realistic shot of unseating unpopular incumbents.
3) Parties whose voters are more politically engaged...

...a good reason to get out and vote, i.e. to prevent X party from getting in, or to get Y party out of government. That is, when the result is not beyond conclusion and your vote might make a difference.

For example, 1997 was a high-energy GE, but turnout fell compared to 1992.

Polls aren't a good guide to turnout. Respondents tend to be more politically engaged than non-respondents, and therefore more likely to be voters.

I'm not sure that 'low-energy' elections necessarily always see low turnout. A better predictor is the degree to which the electorate think there's...

I've seen some *bad* polling in the past, like the 2020 US Presidential poll that suggested Trump was winning among African Americans because they upweighted a sample of like 3.

But I've never seen such half-arsed polling before.

Absolutely fantastic statement for the Telegraph to make in their article where not only did the provider of their MRP forget to remove Greens from constituencies and suggest Reform's strongest seat in Scotland would be Strathkelvin and Bearsden, *they didn't even do D'Hondt correctly*

This is simultaneously staggeringly poor but also not particularly surprising, if I'm completely honest...

MRP is a technique with lots of potential, but the devil is in the application of it.

We are not going to see the sort of geographical realignment of party support necessary to get these constituency/regional results on these national vote shares. It simply isn't going to happen.

Two men killed after wrong-way motorway crash near Kinross Police say a grey Ford Kuga was seen driving northbound on the southbound carriageway of the M90 at about 22:30 on Friday.

I live in Kinross, at the M90's J6, just north of which this crash occurred.

Just thinking about the road layouts and physical barriers around the J6 ramps, I simply can't see how you get onto the southbound carriageway driving north unless you do it on purpose and put effort into doing so.

A weekly GB poll is almost reflexive. Devolved polling requires more thought and effort. So take the path of least resistance. It really is a disservice.

Tightening budgets don't help explain it either. ROI in terms of cut through is higher for devolved polling ATM than for GB polling, despite the latter being cheaper - for the reasons I've mentioned above.

Which leads me to think that the problem is that too many research agencies just don't care.

...more effectively than devolved polling would.

Except they're largely not paying attention to GB polls ATM and there are so many that yours will *not* cut through.

Whereas their internal stakeholders will care about the results in Scotland and Wales, because their businesses operate there, too.

There's a huge misallocation of resources when it comes to political polling in the UK.

Usually I'd understand it. Research clients are clustered largely in London, and market research budgets largely sit with those London-based clients. As a marketing exercise, GB polling cuts through to them...