How Scottish Labour's Kezia Dugdale may have handed the election to the Tories

[Denzil_DC]

20. Yeah, but saying a certain party "got lucky" is a bit meaningless.

There's a reason why polls are expressed in confidence intervals (not that anybody in the media and general public pays them much attention).

If we could run the same polls multiple times in a hypothetical universe (which the best polling models actually do in simulations - the Monte Carlo method), sometimes the SNP would have gotten more votes and more seats, sometimes less. Same for all the parties. You could as easily claim the SNP got unlucky for it to be so close in those seats, and it would be as meaningless. If you look at vote share, you could argue they were unlucky or lucky depending whether you're a glass-half-full type or not, and that wouldn't mean much either.

They're now marginals, some extreme marginals (21-vote and 2-vote majorities in a couple of cases).

After the last utterly exceptional SNP landslide election and absurd swings, were they safe SNP seats? Nope. I don't think anybody sensible, especially the SNP, thought that. I actually don't think there's a safe seat in the whole of Scotland right now, for any party - we're in that much flux.

Will they be marginals in the next election? On paper, yes. But this was almost as much a wave election as the last one for the SNP and the dynamics are likely to be rather different, so I'd be wary of placing any bets.