YouGov polls cannot be trusted to claim ‘SNP vote falls’

The Herald today has:

Reform UK has surged ahead of Scottish Labour while the SNP’s regional vote share falls to its lowest level in 23 years, according to a bombshell poll. The latest polling from YouGov suggests the SNP will remain the largest party in Holyrood by a substantial margin despite a fall in support.

YouGov polls have proven themselves regularly unreliable and with a bias against both the SNP and Yes vote.

The last two YouGov polls above, uniquely, did not satisfy Wikipedia‘s verification test:

In the English Wikipediaverifiability means that people can check that facts or claims correspond to reliable sources.

The last FIVE YouGov polls on Scottish independence uniquely, due to skewing their sample to match the 2014 result, find No leads among a sequence of Yes leads by other pollsters. They presumably do something similar for the Holyrood polls.

The small letters in the right-hand column refer to irregular practice such as not including 16/17 year-olds.

One thought on “YouGov polls cannot be trusted to claim ‘SNP vote falls’

  1. Ah, so that is the Heralds reporting of the “Bombshell Poll”, see that’s their “Trusted Journalism” or perhaps more like “Rusted Journalism” for you.

    The comments to the piece in the Herald are quite amusing. It looks like the remnants of the Green Ink / Better Together / Scotland in Union are all on a high.

    “Shoo in” for anyone but the SNP then 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

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