Scottish Referendum: NO side likely win

The trend recently has been for the YES side to stop growing and for the NO side to maintain a consistent lead.  Two excellent analysts that I follow both conclude the NO side is likely to win. However, there has never been a Scottish referendum on independence so there remains some uncertainty.

Claire Durand in a post published today(and she may update once more) estimates the NO side lead at seven points. She has been following the youth vote closely and the most interesting part of her analysis is a chart that reports support for the YES among youth peaked about two weeks ago and started to decline.

Peter Kellner of the UK polling firm YouGov has an interesting analysis published two days ago. YouGov is the firm that reported the YES side ahead in a poll done for the September 7 Sunday Times. However, Kellner argues things changed during the week following when the NO campaigned counter-attacked:

Last week, following our shock poll, the No campaign fought back strongly, with Gordon Brown appealing to Labour voters flirting with independence. Better together was aided by retailers warning of higher prices and Scottish banks warning of moving their headquarters to London, should Yes win on Thursday. Our midweek poll caught a marked change of mood. Not only did we report a 3% swing back to No, which returned to the lead, albeit only narrowly. More significant was the six point rise in the number of Scots thinking Yes would be bad for their economy – and an eight point rise in the number fearing that their own finances would suffer.

It should not be surprising that a campaign that effectively raised the prospect of bad economic consequences if the YES were to win should be effective. The use of Gordon Brown as a communicator also helped.  For example, see this excerpt from a Brown speech just uploaded to Youtube today:



Polls close tomorrow night at 10 pm Scottish time, 5 pm Eastern time in Canada.  If there are good exit polls and the margin is more than a couple of points we will know the outcome early.

Scottish Referendum

The Scottish referendum, scheduled for September 18, is getting a great deal of attention with a recent YouGov poll showing a one point 'Yes' lead, which in real terms is a statistical tie.

TC recommends reading Claire Durand's blog Ah les sondages on the referendum. She is one of Canada's best experts on polling in Quebec meaning that an independence referendum in Scotland is a natural topic for her and she has been writing about it.  Her latest was today. Here is the key excerpt:

If I use only the polls conducted since the beginning of August, here is what I get. .... The Yes side is at about 47% and the No side at 53%.

You should read the whole post to understand her conclusion.