Labour weren’t downplaying Wednesday’s Ipsos poll, but they weren’t letting it get them down either.
There were, sources said, positives.
But there’s no getting away from it: the top line is bad for Anas Sarwar and his party.
In their latest Scottish Political Monitor, carried out for STV News , the pollster had support for the SNP at 39% in the constituency, while Labour has fallen five points to 15%, putting them on level pegging with Reform.
On the list, the SNP were at 29%, ahead of the Scottish Greens and Reform on 16%. Support for Labour had dropped to 15%.
Seat projections for Ipsos have the SNP on 63, with the Greens second on 17 seats, Reform UK on 15 and Labour in fourth with 14 MSPs — down from the 22 won in 2021.
Read more
Why Russell Findlay’s smiley face says everything about the Tory campaign
What the hell is going on with Reform UK? Inside the Holyrood election turmoil
May elections are a crunch point for Labour - but what happens next is far from clear
SNP sources were also quick to point out that, away from the voting intention numbers, there were a slew of other decent stats for their man.
When asked if they were satisfied or dissatisfied with the way John Swinney is doing his job, 40% said they were satisfied.
The Ipsos Scottish Political Monitor surveyed 1,038 adults in the first week of election campaigning, on March 26 and March 31.
Admittedly, 48% said they were dissatisfied, but his people think this core satisfaction rate — higher than any other leader by some distance — is good going for a politician who has been at the heart of government for 20 years.
They also pointed to the question on which party voters believe they trust to tackle the cost of living crisis. Labour has fallen four points since Ipsos’ last survey and is now in third place behind the SNP and Reform.
Given that 41% of voters say the cost of living is the issue which will help them ultimately decide who to vote for, that’s disastrous.
So what are the positives Labour are taking away from the poll?
Well, the fact that 42% of voters say they could still change their minds. That’s a staggering number, and far more than the 25% or so who said the same at this stage in the 2021 campaign.
And then there’s tactical voting. Around one in eight voters told Ipsos they are backing a party primarily to keep another out, with that figure rising among Labour and Liberal Democrat supporters.
Most voters who say they’re going to vote tactically are voting tactically against Reform.
Speaking to the Holyrood Sources podcast, Mark McGeoghegan from Ipsos said this threw up all sorts of questions for the campaign.
“Are Labour going to be able to argue successfully that you need to vote for them tactically to get out the SNP and to prevent Reform from getting in, or is the SNP going to more effectively be able to argue that you need to vote SNP because Labour can’t beat Reform and you want to keep Reform out?”
Next month’s vote still remains highly sensitive to even small shifts; differences of just three to five percentage points could determine the outcome in about 15–20 marginal constituencies that the SNP could still lose.
Get Scotland's top politics newsletter straight to your inbox .
Even a small national change in vote share can flip a lot of individual constituencies at once. If Labour goes up a few points in one Central Belt seat, they usually go up by a similar amount in other, demographically similar seats.
So if Sarwar gains, say, 4–5 points in the national vote, you flip a cluster of marginals that all had SNP leads of only 3–5 points.
The big numbers look bad for Labour — and they are. And they look good for the SNP — and they are.
There’s a reason the bookies are offering odds of 1/33 on the SNP being returned as the largest party and 33/1 on it being Labour.
But the final result of this election — whether the SNP end up on about 65 seats or 50, whether Labour are second or fourth — could ultimately be decided by the small numbers.
Share