Recently in Polling Category

Surprisingly, perhaps, Liberal voters (8.88/10) reported as least likely to get out, behind Labour (8.91/10). 

I'm not sure why, but my guess is distaste for Clegg's promise to cut taxes'n'services. 

The headline figures aren't as good for us, sure, but it's a firmer starting point.

That leaves 12% unallocated. In 2007, of voters who didn't back one of those four parties on the list, about half of them voted Green. So are we on 6%? Who knows. Maybe we should have an election and find out.

Disappointingly, the focus of the questions was almost entirely on what we, the public, should do. How important is it for me, as a consumer, to buy some kind of notionally happy-pig pork? Tough question for a vegetarian, that. How important is it for me to turn the taps off while I brush my teeth? We're on the record on that one.

There was next to nothing about what Government should do. Do you back binding annual targets for greenhouse gas emissions? No question. If you support targets, what should they be? 3%, as per the SNP's weak manifesto pledge? 4.5%, as per the Green manifesto? Somewhere in between? No question. Do you think the Scottish Government should spend more than £5bn on their roads programme, or put the money into public transport instead? Unsurprisingly, no question.

You can tell a lot by the questions asked. And the SNP's aim with this kind of research is clear - to make the public feel bad for not doing more to tackle climate change, and to shirk any responsibility themselves. Constructing a list of questions like that is the clearest demonstration that the choice architects have been at work.

As a footnote, there was a curious error in the poll. I got given a booklet with numbered answers, each associated with a particular question. For instance, there was a list of sources for information about climate change, and the question was "who do you trust?". Clue: independent scientists, not either Government.

One of the other questions listed opinions from "Climate change is an immediate and serious problem that we should tackle now" through to "I do not believe climate change is happening". I looked at the list, and just said "the first one", or whichever place Green option was listed at. 

The interviewer looked shocked, given that I'd outed myself as a Green, and it turned out the prompts were in reverse order to the options on his laptop. It was just easy to spot the error because he knew what I'd say, and he could tell I wasn't a climate change denier. Who knows how many others have had their views misrecorded on this question?

So if when the poll comes out from the Scottish Government, feel free to ignore the results from that answer. And do please resist the implicit idea that climate change isn't something the SNP administration should help tackle.

A couple of days ago Jeff at SNP Tactical Voting (left) floated a radical idea for the next Holyrood election, assuming the SNP remain way ahead of Labour in the polls. Other SNP tactical voters, he suggests, should consider giving the Greens their regional list vote, formerly known as the second vote. 

We are, he says, "a cracking party", hopefully in the "cracking cheese, Gromit" sense. 

Above all, for him and other tactically-minded nationalists, this is because we Greens support a referendum on Scotland's constitutional future. With Wendy gone, no-one else does, so their Bill is almost certain to fall.

However much the SNP find it rewarding to go to the country in 2011 complaining about "obstructive unionists", the electoral system makes getting 65+ seats an exceptionally tall order for a single party. 

This isn't a coincidence: it was part of the original Dewarite thinking - along with "dish the Nats" and "inevitable coalition government". Those two objectives may have demonstrably failed, but 65+ remains a mountain under the alternative member system, which was designed to give diminishing returns as you get closer to the magic number. Some wonk should do a graph. It'd probably look a bit like this. 

Although Salmond has an eye-popping ability to make extravagant political predictions come true, as noted here before, even he hasn't claimed they can get an absolute majority next time. In his tartan heart he knows it isn't going to happen, otherwise we'd have definitely heard about it from him.

All things must pass, as I keep reminding SNP friends, but it does remain hard to see how Labour can restore their fortunes in less than three years without an Nat implosion of some as yet unknowable sort. If the SNP go into the next election 19 points ahead on the constituency list, might it make sense for them to encourage their voters to back the Greens, at least in some regions? 

To see the sort of wasted votes they're worried about, just look at Central Scotland, where 112,596 people voted Labour on the list last time, almost as many votes as the second and third parties combined. This heroic turnout returned precisely zero list MSPs. The same applied in 2003 and in 1999. Massive piles of votes straight into the recycling, effectively expressing no preference amongst the other parties.

The same happened in Glasgow, and in West, and in South, at all three elections. In short, Labour list votes haven't elected anyone across half of Scotland since the Parliament was established. Liberal list voters in the Highlands have never elected an MSP, either, incidentally.

If the Nats start cleaning up completely in the constituencies (as per this fantasy constituency map), the same would undoubtedly start happening to them, starting in the North East, then Mid Scotland and Fife, then Highlands and Islands. Salmond's people are surely too smart to let those votes pile up for no purpose, unlike Labour strategists?

Under these circumstances, I can quite see why, leaving aside the referendum, SNP supporters might well think it better to make us their second choice. They see Labour as the obstacle, so they're absolutely out. The Liberals stuck two fingers up at them in May last, so they're absolutely out. The Tories have proved pragmatic partners for Salmond's administration but remain ultra-Unionist, so they're out for many. 

So, Green it is, then. While we disagree with a swathe of SNP policy (over transport, planning, climate change and the economy in particular), we also agree on a fair amount too (tuition fees, nuclear power and nuclear weapons, civil liberties, support for small businesses and votes at 16, to pick a few examples). 

Such an election would also not feature the squeeze which cost us so dearly last year, and which was replicated in Glasgow East. Even without tactical voting, we are clearly best placed to benefit from any desire to make post-2011 "a more interesting and diverse parliament" if we work hard and make a clear case for a green agenda. 

Jeff says "it's thyme", presumably because herbs are green too. Whatever the logic, I'm always pleased to see people making the case for Green votes. It's sage advice.

Kez agrees.

Craig, not so much.

Angry Steve, not at all.

I know people always single out polls they like, and that this is indeed relevant to my interests, but that's life.

Update: The Tory figure was misquoted on UKPR. They were up 1, not down 1. And the other Others were down 2 as well. Hopefully that means the BNP.

If you're not into the bizarre maths of polling, please don't read this, just come back later.

Anyway, ICM asked how Glasgow East constituents voted in the 2005 General Election, and, like many other pollsters, they compared that data against the actual 2005 results to see how representative their sample was. 

They expected thirty-one of their sample to report having voted Liberal, but only got six. I can imagine why, incidentally. So each of those six people miraculously become five and a sixth people. Except that one of them felt it was unlikely they'd vote, so got discounted, and, taking into account the overall weighting for likelihood to vote, only four of these 2005 Liberals remained. However, each now counted for six people. Super-Liberals, if you will.

In a final round of magic, one of these four Super-Liberals plans to vote SNP, so six votes got added to their column (see the second column from the right on page three of the ICM report). That's a 25% swing between these two parties, except for the one 2005 Nat who's gone the other way. He or she is much less important, as we'll see.

In sharp contrast, the fifty-five people who said they'd voted SNP in 2005 were weighted down to thirty-six. Of them, 94% will still vote SNP, but their opinions only count as two-thirds of a person, unlike our rogue Super-Liberal, who, you'll remember, is now six people. So if you told ICM you voted Liberal in 2005, your opinions are nine times more influential on the poll outcome than if you said you'd voted for the Nats. 

(The rows don't add up properly on that page, something I intend to ask Nick Sparrow about. Alternatively, anyone who gets how the 2005 figures or the 2008 intentions add up to the total on the left, please let me know. Paging Mark Ballard!)

Seeing as we've come this far down the rabbit-hole of psephology, there's another quirk here beyond the one Mike noted. When ICM asked about actual 2008 voting intentions, only ten people said they were voting for the Liberal candidate, but this number was too low, so got weighted up to twenty-four. 

On the other hand, twenty-three respondents planned to vote Tory, but ICM weighted them down because the sample had slightly more 2005 Tories than expected, and they eventually counted for just nineteen.

So twenty-three people in this poll said they'd vote Tory, and just ten that they'd vote Liberal. Yet the final numbers, generated by a massive amount of hand-waving and pure woo! show the Liberals on 9% and the Tories on 7%. 

Thank you for your patience if you're still here. Here's my prediction, based on the raw numbers, despite a small sample - the Tories will come out ahead of the Liberals. 

Update: the next poll has the Tories on 7% and the Liberals on 3%. This is exactly in line with the raw numbers from ICM.

But apparently the public picked the Chihuahua as the dog they most associate with Nick Clegg.