In YouGov’s model, although every seat is given a projected winner, if the margin is less than five percent of vote share it is considered a “tossup” seat. Scotland has 22 such seats, almost 40 percent of the total seats up for grabs in the country.
In every single one of these tossup seats, the SNP is one of the top parties fighting it out. In the North East the SNP is battling the Conservatives to win over more rural, right-leaning voters and in the central belt it must combat Labour’s attempts to lure a broadly urban and left-leaning population.
“There are kind of two different elections really going on within Scotland. The SNP is having to fight both of them against different opponents whereas their opponents are just kind of fighting one of them and that makes it very, very difficult,” says Diffley.
Depending on the way it goes in the tossup seats on election night, this could spell results even more dire than the projections suggest, or a far smaller loss for the SNP than the party may fear.
As Diffley puts it: “It is almost inevitable that they will lose a significant number of seats. Now, whether that’s 20, whether that’s 30, you know, we don’t know. […] But what we do know, I think, and even people with inside the SNP will tell you, it’s going to be quite a difficult night for them in a few weeks.”
The charts in this piece are all based on YouGov’s MRP model using data from May 24 – June 1 2024. Estimated seat projections are based on modeled responses from 53,334 adults in England and Wales and 5,541 in Scotland to the question “Now thinking specifically about your own constituency, and imagining that these were the political parties standing, which party do you intend to vote for in the July 4th 2024 UK general election?“
Giovanna Coi contributed to reporting.