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Scottish independence long term polling August 2021

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Below is a plot of all independence Y/N polling data going back to 2011. For each year, an average has been taken of all polls from individual pollsters (from the what Scotland thinks website)*. These averages were then combined to give a single new average value for all, ensuring no specific pollster bias. In all years bar 2015, some form of mandate existed for an independence referendum, making that year slightly anomalous in the series; people were free to use Y/N polling as a 'protest', e.g. for more devolution, without fear it might prompt the Scottish Government to hold another vote. In terms of the overall data trend, it can be seen that the series is characterised by a decadal steady increase in support for independence which varies on the shorter term between a 'baseline' and 'upper bound'. The baseline can be assumed to be those that will always vote Yes 'tomorrow', no questions asked. They are mainly Scottish people who just do not identify as...
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SNP membership long term trends

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One of the classic unionist myths is that SNP membership is 'secret', and has supposedly 'collapsed', 'possibly to as low as 50,000', to quote some erm 'real independence supporters' commenting on the National. This is of course utter guff. The SNP publish data on their membership annually as part of the audited accounts submitted to the Electoral Commission*. It would be illegal to falsify membership data here, and illegal for Johnston Carmichael (the SNP's auditors) to knowingly sign that off. The latest data has just been released, and is the final point in the graph below. As can be seen, since the post 2014 surge, SNP membership has never fallen below 100k. In fact it steadily increased longer term to a peak in 2019-2020 (a recent peak for Yes in polls) before falling away due to covid. The main reason people gave for leaving during this period was apparently due to financial reasons associated with lost income during the pandemic, which seems p...
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Irish reunification long term polling trends

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I don't claim to be any expert on N. Ireland, apart from being a Irish National thanks to my Irish gran who was born in the North before it existed, i.e. pre-partition.  But then this is simply a statistical analysis of data, using the exactly the same procedure as for Scotland here: https://skiersfirindy.blogspot.com/2021/08/oan-subject-of-yes-polling.html With data sourced from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Ireland#Opinion_polling Suffice to say while the dataset is small, the trend in NI seems very clear, with potential parallels to that of Scotland. Namely, there is a steadily rising Yes baseline with waverers on top responding to events to give occasional peaks; Brexit being the obvious one in the graph, with covid maybe giving people pause for thought? It seems the UK has very little time left. Baseline support for reunification may hit majority by as early as 2023.
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