26APR

SNP at 62, three short of 65

4 min read

13:33UTC

YouGov's final Holyrood MRP, fielded 25 April to 5 May on more than 6,500 Scottish adults, projects the SNP at 62 seats. John Swinney named 65 as the trigger for a 2028 independence referendum.

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PoliticsAssessed

Key takeaway

YouGov's final Holyrood MRP puts the SNP at 62 seats, three below Swinney's 65-seat referendum trigger.

YouGov's final Holyrood MRP, fielded 25 April to 5 May 2026 on a sample of 6,500-plus Scottish adults, projects the SNP at 62 seats in the 129-seat chamber, Reform UK at 19, Scottish Labour at 17, the Scottish Greens at 16, the Lib Dems at 8, and the Scottish Conservatives at 7 ¹. The SNP achieves an outright majority in 11% of simulations. The combined SNP-Greens pro-independence bloc clears the majority threshold in 99%.

The number matters because John Swinney named 65 seats as the trigger for a 2028 independence referendum . The earlier model spread, YouGov 67 in late March , Electoral Calculus 67, and More in Common 56 in April , has converged on 62, closer to the More in Common end of the range. The IFS noted in its closing-week sweep that no Scottish poll has put the SNP above 65 since the manifesto launch.

The distinction the campaign did not draw is between formal mandate threshold and functional parliamentary majority. Holyrood operates the Additional Member System (AMS), which combines 73 constituency FPTP seats with 56 regional list seats allocated by D'Hondt. Under AMS the Parliament can pass a resolution requesting a Section 30 order on a simple majority of 65 votes; the SNP-Greens combined deliver that majority in 99% of simulations. The 65-seat number Swinney attached to his own party was a campaigning device, not a constitutional one. Wes Streeting has already pre-empted the Holyrood vote by ruling Westminster will refuse, irrespective of the seat outcome.

Swinney addressed the gap on Tuesday 5 May, committing to a Section 30 vote 'on the first sitting day after appointment of the new government' and a draft referendum bill within 100 days ². 62 seats wins Swinney the chamber and loses him the test he set himself.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Scotland votes tomorrow for its parliament, called Holyrood. The Scottish National Party (SNP), which has governed Scotland for nearly two decades, set itself a target: win 65 of the 129 available seats, and use that as the political argument for demanding another independence referendum in 2028. The final polls put the SNP at 62, three short. Three seats matters, and also turns out not to matter legally. The SNP plus the Scottish Greens, another pro-independence party, is projected to hold a parliamentary majority in 99% of polling simulations. That gives them enough votes to pass a motion asking Westminster to allow a referendum. But the UK Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, already said on 16 April that Westminster will say no regardless of the result. So Scotland faces a situation where the parliament may vote for a referendum the UK government has already decided to block. The 65-seat question is partly about whether SNP leader John Swinney faces an awkward post-election conversation about having missed his own number.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

1. **Streeting's pre-poll Section 30 refusal.** By ruling out a Section 30 order before polling day (ID:2798), the Westminster government removed the political pathway the 65-seat trigger was designed to open. Swinney's mandate test was constructed on the assumption that a strong enough SNP result would make refusal politically costly for Westminster; Streeting's pre-emptive refusal collapsed that assumption before votes were counted.

2. **The 2023 Supreme Court ruling on unilateral referendums.** The court's November 2022 ruling that the Scottish Parliament cannot legislate for an independence referendum without Westminster consent removed the one constitutional alternative to a Section 30 order. This ruling closed the route under which seat count alone could have triggered action, leaving Section 30 as the only legal pathway.

3. **SNP membership and fundraising decline since 2023.** The SNP entered 2026 with roughly 72,000 members, down from 125,000 at peak post-2014; the party's fundraising difficulties contributed to a campaign operation below the 2021 level. This constrained the SNP's ground game in the regional list seats that determine the gap between 62 and 65.

4. **AMS regional list mechanics.** Holyrood's Additional Member System corrects for constituency over-performance on the regional list: an SNP that sweeps constituency seats sees its list vote translated into fewer regional seats. The more constituency seats the SNP wins, the harder it is to reach 65 seats total, because the D'Hondt regional list correction partially offsets constituency gains.

What could happen next?

Consequence
A Section 30 vote on the first sitting day of the new parliament is procedurally certain given the 99%-simulation SNP-Greens majority; its passage is formality without Westminster consent to the underlying order.
Immediate · 0.9
Risk
Swinney's 65-seat framing becomes a unionist talking point: he missed his own mandate threshold, weakening his public argument for a 2028 referendum regardless of parliamentary arithmetic.
Short term · 0.8
Precedent
A Holyrood parliament with a pro-independence majority but no Westminster agreement will test whether the constitutional convention approach Swinney's 100-day plan proposes can build visible momentum without a legal route to a referendum.
Medium term · 0.65

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Primary parallel: Alex Salmond's SNP won 69 Holyrood seats in May 2011, the only time in the Parliament's history a single party held a majority, and used that result to negotiate the Edinburgh Agreement with David Cameron, securing a Section 30 order for the 2014 referendum.

Cameron's government chose to negotiate rather than refuse; the Starmer government's position, confirmed by Streeting before the poll (ID:2798), is categorical refusal regardless of the seat outcome. The 2011 bilateral route does not exist in 2026 because the UK Government pre-closed it.

Counter-parallel: The SNP's 2007 minority government ran on 47 of 129 seats, governing without a majority through confidence-and-supply arrangements and avoiding a referendum entirely. A 62-seat result with Green support produces a stronger governing position than 2007 by any count. The 2007 precedent cuts against the idea that missing the 65-seat target constitutes a governing crisis, even if it creates a mandate-framing problem.

Consensus view: John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde and Britain's most-cited electoral statistician, has consistently maintained that the 65-seat figure Swinney attached to a referendum mandate is a political device rather than a constitutional threshold. The Scottish Parliament's standing orders require only a simple majority (65 of 129 votes) to pass a resolution; the SNP-Greens combined bloc clears that bar in 99% of YouGov's simulations regardless of whether the SNP reaches 65 seats alone.

Ailsa Henderson, professor of political science at the University of Edinburgh and co-author of the most comprehensive survey of Scottish constitutional attitudes, has noted that the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling against a unilateral referendum removed the one route through which the seat count would have had independent constitutional weight.

Counter-view: Constitutional scholars at the University of Glasgow's School of Law argue that a Section 30 order is a political negotiation, not a legal obligation Westminster must accept, so the SNP's formal seat count matters as bargaining leverage: a 65-seat SNP result would have made Streeting's refusal harder to sustain publicly than a 62-seat result that falls short of the party's own named threshold .

From Edinburgh, political scientist James Mitchell has written that referendum mandates operate in political culture rather than in law, and that Swinney's 65-seat number will be read by unionist politicians as the benchmark, not the 99%-simulation independence majority.

Key tension: Whether Swinney treats the SNP-Greens combined parliamentary majority as his operative mandate or holds to the 65-seat SNP-only threshold he campaigned on, a distinction Holyrood's standing orders cannot resolve and Westminster's refusal makes moot in the near term.

First Reported In

Update #6 · 1 Days to Go: D'Hondt squeezes Welsh Greens

YouGov· 6 May 2026

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Causes and effects

Caused by

Second MRP confirms SNP majority path

YouGov's first Holyrood MRP at 67 seats converged downward to 62 in the final MRP, narrowing toward the More in Common 56 baseline

Occurred 11 Apr 2026

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More in Common puts SNP short of majority

More in Common's Holyrood MRP at 56 was the lower bound of the three-model spread that resolved to YouGov final 62

Occurred 24 Apr 2026

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Swinney bids for 2028 vote; Streeting refuses

Swinney's 65-seat independence trigger (set at SNP manifesto launch) is directly measured against the 62-seat final MRP projection

Occurred 16 Apr 2026

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This Event

SNP at 62, three short of 65

A central estimate inside Swinney's parliamentary bloc but outside his self-imposed mandate threshold turns the morning-after question into one Holyrood's standing orders cannot answer.

Led to

SNP wins 58, below 65-seat trigger

YouGov final Holyrood MRP projecting SNP at 62 bracketed the 58-seat actual; both sit below Swinney's 65-seat trigger

Occurred 6 May 2026

Read story →

Different Perspectives

Green Party

Zack Polanski's campaign delivered the Hackney and Lewisham mayoralties and both councils, plus 543 English council seats, establishing the first Green governing base in outer London. The 153-seat MRP undershoot was attributed to FPTP tactical dynamics in marginal wards rather than a polling error in vote share.

UK Labour Government

Keir Starmer's government faces the immediate test of whether to intervene in Lancashire's withdrawal from the UK refugee resettlement scheme and the longer question of how to respond if the SNP tables a Section 30 vote. MHCLG's posture on Reform-controlled councils sets the template for the next four years of divided local government.

Scottish National Party (SNP)

John Swinney committed to a Section 30 vote on the first Holyrood sitting day post-appointment and a draft referendum bill within 100 days, reframing the 58-seat result as a working mandate despite missing his own 65-seat trigger. Westminster's pre-stated refusal of a Section 30 order means the constitutional confrontation is now a matter of timing.

Plaid Cymru

Rhun ap Iorwerth confirmed on 8 May that Plaid would attempt to govern Wales as a minority, ruling out immediate coalition talks and naming budget priorities as the test of cross-party support. The 43-seat result leaves Plaid six seats short of the 49-seat majority threshold.

Reform UK

Nigel Farage claimed 7 May as a historic breakthrough, pointing to 1,448 new councillors and 14 councils won from a near-zero base. The internal reckoning is that transition teams built for 22 councils must now govern 14, and three of those 14 produced immediate governance disputes.

Wales Governance Centre

The Centre framed Wales's mid-campaign Green-to-Plaid consolidation as 'consolidation, not conversion' in April, meaning voters did not migrate ideologically but regrouped tactically inside the same bloc because closed-list PR made it arithmetically rational. The final MRP result confirms that framing.