The latest Scottish and Welsh election polling
Welcome to the 198th edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP), and a particularly warm hello to a double wave of new readers driven by last week’s edition about Andy Burnham and by a kind passing mention from Polly Toynbee in The Guardian.
This week, with a quartet of polls for the Scottish or Welsh elections recently published, it is time to take a look at what they say.
That is followed by a summary of the latest national voting intentions polls, seat projections from MRPs, and the most recent party leader ratings.
Subscribers who pay for the full edition can also read ten insights from the latest polling and analysis, including:
That Gorton and Denton by-election poll;
The public’s views on banning mobile phones in schools; and
Rising support for first-past-the-post among Reform supporters.
If you are not yet a paid subscriber, you can read all ten by starting a free trial now:
For more polling news as it comes in during the week, you can also follow The Week in Polls on Bluesky.
One last preliminary - and it’s nothing to do with polling - but I suspect readers interested in polling are also interested in political party logos. An… interesting application has just gone in to the Electoral Commission (and why do the two clocks show different times?).
And with that, on with the show.
Scottish Parliament polling
We have now had a trio of polls this year looking at the Scottish Parliament elections, coming in early May, one each from Norstat, Survation and YouGov.
Let’s start with Norstat’s regular polling for The Sunday Times:
Note that, similar to Westminster Parliament polling, Reform has seen a considerable rise in the polls, but may now be slipping back from its peak.
There is also, as The Sunday Times adds, a possibility of significant anti-Reform tactical voting in the constituency contests:
The findings also suggested Reform’s toxicity with a significant number of Scots would see them abandon their normal party loyalties, if it meant blocking one of Farage’s candidates from becoming an MSP.
Asked how they would vote if a constituency race was a two-way contest between Reform and the SNP, 57 per cent of Labour voters said they would lend their vote to the nationalists. Meanwhile, if they were convinced their seat was a straight fight between only Labour and Reform, 76 per cent of those planning to vote SNP would back Sarwar’s party.
It is a similar picture with YouGov, although they have Reform up in second place on both ballots:
YouGov’s previous poll was sufficiently far in the past that we cannot see with them if there is a similar peak and slight slide for Reform.
We do though have a run of data from the firm’s independence tracker, showing ‘No’ continuing to lead, albeit by varying amounts:
Finally, Survation, which does have enough of a data series to test out that Reform question. As The National reported:
The SNP are on course to be the largest party come May, with Scottish Labour and Reform UK neck-and-neck for second place…
Damian Lyons Lowe, chief executive of Survation, who conducted the polling, said: …“Reform’s momentum may be stalling at 19 per cent (-3)”.
He also added doubts in his quote about the chances of an SNP majority, which the paper rather talked up in the rest of its coverage.
Overall then, the SNP ahead, but not in a definite majority-winning position, Labour possibly a little ahead of Reform and Reform likely slipping a bit.
Welsh Senedd polling
Wales, alas, continues to suffer from a paucity of polling data. But we have had a YouGov poll this year:
As the pollster points out:
This is Labour’s lowest Senedd vote share to date with YouGov in Wales, having fallen a further four points since September, and marks a substantial collapse from the 36% of the regional list vote they won across Wales in the 2021 election [under a different electoral system].
We also have YouGov’s latest independence tracker:
A similar picture in some ways to Scotland then as, although independence is much less popular in Wales, in both cases the nationalist party is in pole position, and Reform is set to become one of the largest parties, while Labour is looking set for a defeat of historic proportions.
On current numbers that is. There is still a lot of politics to go before polling day.
Elsewhere from me…
If you spot a factual error…
Borrowing an idea from Stuart Ritchie and others, if you spot a factual error in an edition of this newsletter, I will give you a 12-month free subscription to the paid-for version (or an extra 12 months on your existing one). Factual errors qualify rather than grammatical errors or disagreements over interpretation, with my decision being final. Messages about both of those are always very welcome, though.
New podcast: Political Fictions
I’m rather excited that my big new project for 2026 is about to see the light of day: Political Fictions, a new podcast with Cory Hazlehurst, from the Not Enough Champagne podcast.
It’s all about TV, film and books featuring politics:
Join Cory Hazlehurst and Mark Pack as they digest some of the best – and some of the worst – depictions of politics in fiction: film, TV and even the occasional book. What political advice is smuggled into these stories and how do they impact on what people think about politicians today?
Here’s our trailer:
We’ve already got our first trio of episodes lined up and I’m looking forward to recording plenty more.
You can subscribe to Political Fictions in all the usual places, including on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music.
You can also follow the podcast via our website, www.politicalfictionspodcast.com.
Voting intentions and leadership ratings
Last week I commented that the run of polls showing the Conservatives inching up seemed to have come to an end, and that is mostly still the picture. Of the last nine polls from seven different pollsters, seven have shown the Conservative vote down on the previous comparable poll from that pollster. It’s the opposite of the pattern we saw earlier in January. That may still just be a bit of statistical noise, but something to keep an eye on.
The table is also online here. It is updated regularly through the week with new polls.
Next, the latest seat projections from MRPs and similar models, also sorted by fieldwork dates. As these are infrequent, note how old some of the ‘latest’ data is.
Finally, a summary of the latest leadership ratings, sorted by pollster name (and note that only some of the data from BMG’s latest poll has been published so far, hence the split of new figures for some leaders but not for others):
The table is also online here with additional details, and is updated regularly through the week as new data comes out.
For the historic figures for both voting intention and leader approval, including Parliamentary by-election polls, see PollBase.
Catch up on the previous two editions
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That Gorton and Denton by-election poll, and 9 other polling insights you shouldn’t miss
The following 10 findings from the most recent polls and analysis are only for subscribers who pay for the full edition, but you can sign up for a free trial to read them straight away.
We have had the first by-election poll for Gorton and Denton. But it had a sample of just 143, and once ‘don’t knows’ are excluded, that falls to 51 people - which causes me to come up with a new rule of thumb: beware of polls where the sample
