Polls paint a mixed picture for Highland seats – can we trust them? They are predicting wins for Liberal Democrats and the SNP
Polls have come in for criticism in recent years for failing to predict a number of big results both at home and abroad and when it comes to assessing voting intention those for the Highlands should be handled with care.
The difficulty for pollsters in Scotland during the general election is what Professor John Curtice said was a lack of sufficient data – it looks like that means some of the information is not that clear.
Further complicating the issue is that all the Highland constituencies were redrawn meaning that analysing which party or candidate may win is not as certain as it might have been had there been continuity.
What is clear is that the likely winners in Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross and Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire will be either the Liberal Democrats or the SNP – locally people have been talking of a two horse race.
We took three of the best known polls – Survation, YouGov and Electoral Calculus – and looked at their very varied results.
Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross: Hover your mouse over the tabs to see the results for each party
Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross was held until the election was called and parliament dissolved by Liberal Democrat Jamie Stone. It was expanded south to include the Black Isle in the east and the Autlbea in the west as well as a chunk of central Ross-shire.
Both Survation and Electoral Calculus put the LibDems in front while YouGov has an SNP lead but what is most questionable about the latter is the more than 18 per cent vote share going to the Greens and Reform UK.
Reform UK are running the same candidate as the Brexit Party did – Sandra Skinner – at the last election in 2019 when they polled 3.6 per cent of the vote while the Greens do not have any representative at any level of government within the constituency – that could of course change.
Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire: Hover your mouse over the tabs to see the results for each party
Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire has also been significantly carved-up by the Boundary Commission for Scotland so candidates are covering a huge expanse of land including the region’s only city in Inverness.
The MP for part of this area was the SNP’s Drew Hendry, who held the Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey while a most of the remainder – West Ross-shire, Lochaber and Skye – was part of his SNP colleague Ian Blackford’s seat.
Mr Blackford has stood down but Mr Hendry is running and all three polls are predicting the SNP will win the seat but where it gets questionable is in the predictions for the runners up.
The Liberal Democrats are taking a strong run at the seat with Angus MacDonald as the candidate yet the party is placed behind both Labour and the Conservatives in all the polls and even the Greens in one.
That would reflect to a degree the 2019 votes for both the Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey and the Ross, Skye and Lochaber seats but there’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then.
Brexit was formalised, Covid happened, followed by the cost of living crisis and both Johnson and Truss were in No.10, followed by current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak – none without their controversy, to say the least.
Locally, the Liberal Democrats lost a Highland Council seat but saw their vote share surge at the expense of the SNP and others so the picture on polling day could well be much more complicated.
