In Scotland all the polls in the entire 2017-2019 parliament understated the SNP
The SNP’s 45% of the Scottish vote gave the party 81% of the Scottish seats
One of the features of this month’s general election that hasn’t received much attention is how successful the SNP were in the 59 Scottish sets.
For the third general election is succession it was this part of the UK that saw the most change in terms of seats with on December 12th 15 of the 59 constituencies ending up in different hands. This always looked likely to be the case and why Scotland only polls continue to be very important.
Unfortunately the polling performance north of the border was not quite as good as the GB polls which as noted here last Thursday came out of this month’s election looking good.
The big surprise in Scotland was that the SNP did better than any of the surveys that took place not only during the campaign period itself but throughout all the 2017-2019 Parliament. Not a single Scottish poll in the two and a half years of the last parliament had Sturgeon’s party at or above the 45% that was actually achieved.
The other factor this time was the overstatement of the Scottish Tories with the final polls having the party between 26% and 29% higher than the 25.1% that actually happened. Johnson’s party lost seven of its thirteen Scottish MPs while Scottish LAB was reduced from seven seats north of the border to just one.
While the LDs saw the loss of Jo Swinson’s seat it came out with four Scottish MPs the same as GE2017 on an increased vote share.
The fact that Johnson’s party was able to secure a substantial majority while losing more than half its Scottish seats shows how successful it was in England and Wales.
- NOTE: PB’s server has been updated over the weekend thanks once again to my son Robert