Poll position: Can the SNP really win again in 2026?

The SNP is decamping to Aberdeen for its annual conference. It may be the last time that the party uses TECA, a massive grey hangar of a place on the outskirts of the city, for a while – rules on delegate entitlement have changed and membership is down, meaning other, smaller venues could now be used for the faithful.

In years gone by the SNP looked around Scotland for places to set up stall, heading to Aviemore and Inverness, for example. But the post-indyref surge that saw membership swell to 125,000 meant most places were simply too small. 

More than a decade on, TECA is arguably too big. Sturgeon-mania is over, and membership has reduced to around 56,000. Nicola Sturgeon herself, now developing a writing career, is preparing to leave the backbenches at the same time as her former deputy, John Swinney, is readying his troops to face another ballot box test. 

If recent polling is correct, the party will win the election – surveys show the SNP remains the top choice for voters – but fall short of a majority in a victory that will come with caveats.

Because voters are less than impressed with the party’s performance in government. Four terms in, the SNP may still be in power, but seven in 10 people surveyed told pollsters Ipsos that the country needs new leadership. Only three in 10 said the current Scottish Government deserves to be re-elected, and while Swinney was ranked the most popular political leader in Scotland, his favourability rating was still -10.

Perhaps most concerningly for the party, the Scottish Social Attitudes survey found public trust in the Scottish Government is at a record low, with just 47 per cent of respondents trusting ministers to work in the country’s best interests.

At 22 per cent, satisfaction with the NHS is at a level comparable with the rest of the UK, marking another record low for the study.

With the Scottish Government missing its own targets on areas like stroke care and greenhouse gas emissions, it is not difficult to see why so many Scots are now unimpressed.

“They’re not where they were a decade ago,” says Dr Malcom Petrie of the University of St Andrews. “They’re probably not popular in the way that they were in the run-up to the indyref and immediately afterwards, with a level of membership that was unmatched in most countries. But they’re really dominant and it does feel like they’re probably going to be the largest party in Scotland, but with not much great enthusiasm behind them. It’s not an ideal position for a party to be in – to keep winning, but without much enthusiasm.”

A member of the university’s Institute of Legal and Constitutional Research, Petrie argues that the shifts in the SNP’s fortunes show that Scottish politics “has begun to enter a new era, that the identities and divisions formed by the 2014 referendum and its aftermath have become exhausted”. He suggests that those who loaned the SNP their votes before, particularly independence voters, may now be tempted to “switch their allegiance to other parties or opt to simply not vote”.

Indyref, he says, created a “massive mobilisation of people who wouldn’t normally participate” in elections, boosting turnout in Holyrood contests from what were initially “woeful” levels. Where only 49.4 per cent of the electorate cast a ballot in 2003, that grew to 63.5 per cent in 2021. 

That ‘high’ is just fractionally above the 60 per cent turnout recorded across the UK in the last general election – which was in itself a near-25-year low. 

In that contest, Labour won an impressive Westminster seat share of 63 per cent but did so on a vote share of 33.7 per cent. Legitimacy questions have dogged Keir Starmer’s administration ever since. So, could a victorious SNP face the same fate? “There was a sense in which the SNP’s claim of being a stronger voice for Scotland, a voice for the Scottish people, there was an element of truth in it,” says Petrie. “The SNP could say, ‘we represent a sizeable chunk of the electorate’. If that support is less prevalent now, then it causes issues.”

And the SNP has plenty of issues to grapple with, not least its independence strategy. A new Scottish Government paper lays out the administration’s case for what it says would be a “fresh start” for the country. The 88-page document retreads familiar ground and long-held ambitions to create a sovereign nation-state within the EU and Nato, but without nuclear weapons. With little new in the case, it’s more of a rebrand tying constitutional change firmly into stagnant living standards than it is an advancement of the argument.

The Conservatives have branded it “magical thinking”, while Alba Party leader Kenny MacAskill, the former SNP justice secretary, has said that “telling us yet again what we know all too well is taking us nowhere”.

Still, Swinney – who said we are “reaching or have reached the limits of devolution” – is “optimistic” about the direction of travel.

And, heading into conference season, his party has had some succour: while Swinney’s approval rating is in the negative numbers, Anas Sarwar’s is at -26 and, at -47, Starmer is less popular in Scotland than Donald Trump.

Moreover, while Scots are unimpressed with the SNP’s performance in office, they are equally unconvinced that Scottish Labour – which had been thought of as a government-in-waiting – would do a better job. In an Ipsos survey, fewer than two in 10 said Sarwar’s party is ready to form the next Holyrood administration, down 15 percentage points from March. 

Where the SNP’s net favourability is -11, Scottish Labour’s languishes at -28. It’s a major change since Swinney stepped in with a pledge to steady the ship in 2023, after the Bute House Agreement had collapsed and Humza Yousaf left office in the face of a vote of no confidence.

And while Sarwar has bullishly said that his party has proven pollsters wrong before – “They said we couldn’t win in the Hamilton by-election. We did. And we are going to do the same again next year”, he told Labour’s conference – there is a sense that the SNP currently has the momentum. “You go back to Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf and that moment where it seemed like the SNP’s dominance in Scottish politics was over or heading in that direction,” says Petrie, “but it feels like the SNP don’t have anyone to lose an election to.”

Ask anyone in the SNP and they’ll tell you they’re working on getting the party into election-winning shape. But the organisation has gone through major change in recent months. It is now onto its fourth chief executive since the last Holyrood election, having seen Peter Murrell – who is still facing an embezzlement charge – stand down amidst Operation Branchform, Murray Foote leave after last year’s general election drubbing, and Carol Beattie exit for health reasons just last month. 

The loss of the former Stirling Council chief executive saw the appointment of former Aberdeen Central MP Callum McCaig. Once amongst the UK’s youngest local government leaders – he was just 26 when he took charge at Aberdeen City Council – the 40-year-old has already played a role in the party’s Holyrood machine, having served as a special adviser to ministers including Shona Robison and Nicola Sturgeon. There has been more, too, such as the departures of long-serving deputy chief executive Sue Ruddick and lawyer Scott Martin as well as a governance review and changes to internal rules. 

McCaig has described the party as “fighting-fit and election-ready”. But there is further change to come, with as many as 25 SNP MSPs declaring that they will not run again next time. The number includes two former first ministers in Sturgeon and Yousaf, as well as current and former DFMs Kate Forbes and Robison, plus a slew of serving and past ministers – Fiona Hyslop, Richard Lochhead, Graeme Dey, Natalie Don-Innes, Elena Whitham, Kevin Stewart, Joe FitzPatrick… 

Take all of this together, and it seems that the SNP is at a crossroads. 

If it is truly election-ready, the SNP will have learned lessons from the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election, which was called after the death of SNP incumbent Christina McKelvie. A well-liked MSP and the minister for drug and alcohol policy, she had held the seat since its creation in 2011, but after a campaign which presented Reform UK as the biggest challenger for the constituency and personalised attacks around Labour’s Davy Russell, the SNP vote dropped by almost 17 per cent. 

It was a negative campaign. But SNP national secretary Alex Kerr, who worked for McKelvie, says the party has a positive message to harness. “We’ve changed people’s lives” he says, pointing to policy actions like the Scottish Child Payment, which has been credited with mitigating the rise of child poverty. “It’s an ongoing contract with voters,” he goes on, “we can never take them for granted.”

Kerr, who sits on Glasgow City Council, says his party must “get back on the front foot, delivering for people the way they expect [it] to”. “We’re not there yet – John [Swinney] would say that himself,” he concedes. “But people can see John is serious about it and committed to it. That’s why we are doing so well in the polls, but we need to do better. That goes hand-in-hand with delivery.”

Unveiling his first programme for government in May, Swinney announced his four key priorities as eradicating child poverty, growing the economy, investing in public services and tackling the climate emergency. That statement was brought forward to allow for a full year of delivery. 

Behind the scenes, government sources believe Swinney, with his experience of multiple portfolios is “starting to turn it around”, and that further progress is achievable, particularly following improvements in some areas of health delivery. “We just need to keep that going,” a minister said.

But, from still-undelivered ferries, to ongoing wrangles over the implementation of the Supreme Court ruling on single-sex services, to limited progress on delivery of The Promise for care-experienced children, there is much outstanding. And so there remains plenty for opponents to use as attack lines. Take Scottish Conservative leader Russell Findlay, for example, who hasn’t only accused the SNP of pursuing the “wacky and woke” over the pragmatic. “So many Scots are far worse off now than when the nationalists came to power in 2007,” he told the Conservative Party conference. 

“I don’t just mean financially. I mean worse off in the quality of their lives. It’s hard to put that feeling into words, but we all know it. It’s that impression we get travelling to work, going about our business and looking around streets that were once thriving.

“Scotland has been stuck for more than a decade,” he went on, “and that is because we have an SNP government of grievance – a government fixated on constitutional destruction and not on governance.”

That same party conference illustrated the difficulties facing the Tories right now. While the hall was full for leader Kemi Badenoch’s speech, there was no clamour for those by her shadow cabinet, with swathes of seats unfilled. Now the second party in Holyrood, the Conservatives are currently in fourth place behind Labour and Reform when it comes to voting intention for the next parliament, polling suggests. 

TECA swallows people at the best of times, its main hall far larger than that used by the Tories in Manchester. In recent years, the proportion of empty seats at the SNP’s conferences there has grown. But even as the indyref buzz has waned and membership dwindled, polling suggests that Scots aren’t finished with the country’s largest party yet. What, if anything, will change that over the next six months remains to be seen.

Anas Sarwar has presented the choice facing voters in 2026 as a simple one – “more failure and decline with the SNP or a new direction with Scottish Labour”.

“What I’m hearing from chapping doors is that the world is so depressing right now,” Kerr says, arguing that Labour has failed to deliver the change it promised at the general election. “We’ve got the potential of Prime Minister Nigel Farage, we’ve got Donald Trump in the White House, and things don’t seem to be getting any better. If no one else is offering hope, then it’s incumbent on us to do it.”