The SNP’s start to 2025 has been rather buoyed by recent polling suggesting that it has opened a significant lead over Labour on both Holyrood votes, ahead of the Scottish Parliament elections next May. In the past four months, it has registered an average lead on the constituency vote of 12 points, and an average lead on the list vote of 8.4 points.

Professor Sir John Curtice’s latest projection, based on Survation’s mid-January poll for the Holyrood Sources podcast, suggested that the SNP could win 53 seats at Holyrood to Labour’s 24, leaving it the only party with enough seats to build a minority or coalition government around. It would lose seats compared to its 2021 result, when it fell just one seat short of an overall majority, but would almost certainly remain in power.

But optimism in the SNP camp should be, and I imagine it is, tempered by other considerations. Firstly, it has not gained vote share itself. In the five polls before the General Election in July, its support on the Holyrood constituency ballot was 34.6%; it now stands at 34.4%. In July, 29% of Scottish voters said they would vote for the SNP on the regional list, today that figure still stands at 29%.

John Swinney and Kate Forbes, who took over as First Minister and Deputy First Minister less than two months before the General Election, have steadied the ship and stemmed the outflow of voters from the SNP to Labour. But they are yet to encourage back enough of the voters they lost to begin rebuilding the voter coalition that ensured SNP electoral hegemony from 2014 to last year.

Read more by Mark McGeoghegan

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