Thursday, March 12, 2009

Populus sub-sample : Labour recovery, but SNP still well ahead

As you might recall, last month's Populus sub-sample for Scotland showed Labour (rather improbably) languishing in third place with just 19% of the vote. In this month's breakdown released today, they have staged an eight-point recovery - but this is notably not at the expense of the SNP who have also slightly improved their position. Meanwhile the Tories have tumbled from second to fourth place. Here are the full figures -

SNP 43% (+1)
Labour 27% (+8)
Liberal Democrats 18% (+3)
Conservatives 11% (-9)
Others 2% (-2)


As ever, it's worth bearing in mind that the fluctuations in the figures are often due to the massive margin of error in sub-samples, rather than any real change of public opinion.

4 comments:

  1. James , Jeff on SNP T Voting has the following figures

    SNP - 46.4%
    Labour - 26.2%
    Lib Dems - 15.5%
    Tory - 9.5%
    Greens - 2.4%

    Still both sets have the SNp in the lead, that will do me..

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  2. AMW, I think Jeff (who I have the greatest respect for, as despite being an SNP member he manages to remain far more impartial than me!) is too fixated on the idea of only looking at the figures for all respondents, rather than the headline figures filtered by certainty to vote. I've explained a couple of times why I think he's barking up the wrong tree on that point. I'm taking my numbers from the second page of the detailed breakdown on the Populus website, whereas I presume Jeff must have made his own calculation from the raw figures on the first page.

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  3. I admire you for stat calculations and saving me hours of hair pulling. Same goes for Jeff.

    Does that mean if I add Jeff and your stats together and divide by 2 then I'll get it right? :)

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  4. Which ever way you look at it people like what they see coming out from this Scottish Government.

    Let's see what the first of several real polls tells us in June.

    An increase in the popular vote would be the very minimum we can expect, but who would rule out the capture of another Euro seat?

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