A NEW polling tool which maps out how Scottish independence could be won or lost has been launched.
Created by Dr Eoghan Kelly, the “Scottish Independence Calculator” allows users to explore how demographics such as education, class, or age could affect the outcome of a potential second Scottish independence referendum.
“It’s quite a helpful way to understand how intricate it all is,” Kelly told the Sunday National.
“You hear a lot like, ‘All you need to do is drive up younger people's turnout’ or ‘Try to convince more women’ or ‘Try to convince more rich people’ and it’ll change the result – but it's how everything interplays that's interesting.”
The tool, which has launched today on the DevolvedElections website, uses data from the census and the Scottish Election Study to estimate how voters across the country might vote in a second independence referendum. It also uses the current polling average as a starting point.
Users are able to shift support for Yes or No within different demographics, and see what impact that has on the overall result. For example, a 2% shift towards independence among voters over 65 translates into a 0.7% shift in the final tally.
Kelly – a polling expert who formerly worked at the Scottish Election Study but now runs the Polling London Project at the Mile End Institute of Queen Mary University of London – said that the tool was good for visualising “why parties care about this or that, who they can afford to lose – or who they can't afford to lose as well”.
He explained: “Pro-independence [voters] tend to be slightly younger, slightly more well off, and slightly more educated. They're also slightly more urban, but very slightly; there's not a big geographic divide.
“On the pro-Union [side], people tend to be a bit older, they tend to be less well off, and they tend to be lower educated.
“To a certain extent, education and age are the same thing because so many more younger people now go to university than people who are in their 50s, 60s, when it was relatively rare. So education and age are often very interlinked in a way that gets kind of missed.”
Kelly also noted that “women tend to be slightly more pro-Union than men”.
The polling expert – who created DevolvedElections alongside his software engineer partner Ayushi Gupta – further said that Scottish independence support had at times been “conflated with social liberalism and left-wingism”.
“The Scottish Greens and – less so now but for quite a long time – the SNP really hammered on this idea that [Scotland] needs to be independent to be left-wing.
“It chimes well with you if you're young and liberal, and it doesn't chime well with you if you're older and more conservative.”
He added: “Labour's problem is trying to have a foot on either side of that divide.”
You can find the Scottish independence referendum tool at devolvedelections.co.uk/scottish-independence.
