His potential victory has provoked warnings from Tony Blair that shifting left may be disastrous for Labour.
But could a left-wing Jeremy Corbyn leadership kickstart a revival for the party north of the border? After all, the SNP won 56 out of 59 Westminster seats on an anti-austerity platform akin to Mr Corbyn's.
It is possible to analyse how fertile the electoral ground in Scotland might be for a more left-wing leader of the UK Labour party by looking at the 3100-strong sub-sample of the British Election Study.
The study includes a left-right scale of voter opinion from five questions on attitudes towards things like redistribution of wealth.
This showed that voters of both Labour and the SNP are noticeably skewed towards the left, with almost a quarter of SNP voters on the furthest left position on the scale.
In theory, a left-wing candidate such as Corbyn would be well suited to picking up these voters, many of whom have indeed voted Labour in the past.
Yet the constitutional question makes Scottish politics more complex than this. The study also found that those who voted SNP in May and Yes last September were markedly more left wing than those backed the SNP in the general election despite opposing independence in September 2014. (The Yes SNP voters outnumbered those who voted No and SNP by eight to one).
So although there is a huge chunk of the Scottish electorate that appears to be receptive to a more left-wing message, the national dimension of Scottish electoral politics would undoubtedly present a Corbyn-led Labour with a steep mountain to climb given the party’s opposition to Scottish independence.
Given that those SNP voters who voted Yes are more skewed to the left, the potential for Labour to win them back from the left is doubly difficult given that constitutional preferences clearly interact with ideology.
It is hard to see how Labour, even with Corbyn at the helm, can outfox the SNP on this crucial issue.
This issue is further highlighted by the graphic above.
It shows the ideology of Scottish voters in terms of how happy they were with the referendum result.
It clearly illustrates that at least half of those who are most left-wing in Scotland are disappointed by the outcome.
Indeed the more left-wing you are, the more likely you are to be unhappy with the constitutional status quo, and presumably still committed to Scottish independence.
The election of a left-winger like Corbyn may be a partial solution for Labour in Scotland.
From the perspective of left-wing SNP voters, Labour would be seen to be “getting its soul back” and “going back to its roots” in terms of policy.
But the above analysis demonstrates that Labour’s problems in Scotland go far deeper than mere ideological perceptions, with a large group of natural Corbyn supporters apparently likely to be dissuaded by Labour’s position on independence. The conclusion? The stage is set for the SNP to dominate Scottish politics for the foreseeable future, whoever is elected Labour leader.
*This analysis was initially published in The Conversation. Dr McAngus is a research fellow at the Centre on Constitutional Change and the University of Stirling
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