Labour’s polling in Scotland has greatly improved on the 2019 election when it won less than 19% of the vote and just one seat, and the party will be increasingly confident of making significant gains north of the border.
With Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar having launched his party’s election manifesto on Tuesday, here’s what the latest MRP analyses have found about Labour’s prospects in Scotland:
YouGov
YouGov’s latest MRP analysis of the election campaign projected that Labour will become the largest party in Scotland by a margin of eight seats – with Labour increasing its total number of seats to 28 and the SNP falling to 20. The Tories are projected to win five seats and the Lib Dems four.
The polling company said: “Even for an election with such a dramatic change in the composition of the House of Commons, the churn in Scotland is notable. 32 seats are changing hands according to our model, more than half of the total number of seats.”
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It also found that Scotland is “notably more marginal than England”, with 16 of Scotland’s 57 seats designated as “toss-ups” – where the winning party’s lead is less than five points.
The analysis predicted Labour gains including all six Glasgow seats, Central Ayrshire, Lothian East, Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy and Na h-Eileanan an Iar.
The latest analysis predicted a marginally less dominant performance by Labour than YouGov’s earlier projection from two weeks ago, which predicted Labour would win 34 seats, ahead of the SNP on 17, the Tories on five and the Lib Dems on one.
More in Common
More in Common’s latest MRP analysis also projected that Labour will become the biggest party in Scotland with 33 seats, ahead of the SNP on 18 – though the polling company found that 20 seats in Scotland are within a 5% margin. It put the Tories on four seats and the Lib Dems on two.
READ MORE: Read Scottish Labour manifesto Sarwar calls a ‘blueprint to brighter future’
More in Common’s analysis also predicted that Labour would pick up all of Glasgow’s six seats from the SNP, as well as making gains elsewhere in the country including Dundee Central and Kilmarnock and Loudoun.
The findings mark quite a contrast to More in Common’s analysis from earlier in the campaign, which put the SNP on 35 and Labour on 14 – though at the time the pollster highlighted a wide range of potential outcomes, finding that Labour would win 28 seats if the party won all the seats where it was within 4% of the SNP.
Savanta
Savanta’s MRP analysis – the most cataclysmic of the recent MRP analyses for the Tories, putting the party on just 53 seats – paints the worst picture for the SNP, projecting that the party will pick up just eight seats, with Labour likely to gain constituencies including Hamilton and Clyde Valley and Midlothian.
READ MORE: UK general election poll tracker: Daily roundup on how polls look for Labour
But, alongside its headline findings – which were based on the MRP model’s most likely winner for each individual seat – the pollster published its probability estimates that aggregate the percentage chance of a party winning in all seats. The latter approach saw the SNP winning 13 seats.
The analysis found that nationally 175 seats were “too close to call” (with a less than 7.5 percentage-point difference between first and second), ten of which were Labour leading the SNP and seven of which were the SNP leading Labour.
LabourList has been rounding up the latest polling news in our general election tracker, publishing the results of the main UK pollsters as they are released during the campaign. You can keep up to date with the latest here.
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