The geographical distribution of Yes and No votes in 2014

In an article on Wings over Scotland, the importance of Glasgow for the independence campaign was dismissed: “[T]his site’s prediction remains the same […] – if we get 38% in Glasgow come the autumn of 2014, we’ll win.”

This might of course be true, but it didn’t sound plausible to me, so I decided to have a quick look at the likely distribution of Yes and No votes in the case of a narrow win for the Yes side.

I first found the regional votes from the 2011 election (discarding all parties smaller than the LibDems):

	SNP	Labour	Cons	LibDems
West of Scotland	117306	92530	35995	9148
South of Scotland	114270	70595	54352	15096
Lothian	110953	70544	33019	15588
Central Scotland	108261	82459	14870	3318
Glasgow	83109	73031	12749	5312
Mid Scotland and Fife	116691	64623	36691	15103
North East Scotland	140749	43893	37681	18178
Highlands and Islands	85082	25884	20843	21729
Total	876421	523559	246200	103472

I then got some useful figures from Ipsos Mori about the correlation between political views and independence voting intentions:

	SNP	Labour	Cons	LibDems
Pro	70%	15%	5%	19%
Contra	17%	73%	94%	73%
Don’t Know	13%	12%	1%	8%

If we assign 90% of the Don’t knows to Yes (this might not be realistic, but it’s the easiest way to get a majority in favour of independence), we get this:

	SNP	Labour	Cons	LibDems
Yes	81.7%	25.8%	5.9%	26.2%
No	18.3%	74.2%	94.1%	73.8%

The result of referendum according to these distributions would be a very small Yes victory (51% Yes, 49% No). The geographical distribution would look as follows:

	Yes	No
West of Scotland	48.7%	51.3%
South of Scotland	46.7%	53.3%
Lothian	49.9%	50.1%
Central Scotland	53.4%	46.6%
Glasgow	51.0%	49.0%
Mid Scotland and Fife	50.7%	49.3%
North East Scotland	55.4%	44.6%
Highlands and Islands	54.1%	45.9%

If my calculations are correct, it’s likely the results in Glasgow will be extremely close to the results for Scotland as a whole, and it seems unlikely that 38% Yes in Glasgow would be sufficient to ensure that Scotland becomes independent.