In light of which, here is her statement calling for not for a rerunning of the election but for people who have voted to be able to change their votes:
I have no dog in this fight, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if a) this was allowed and b) it was later shown that it resulted in a decrease in Regan’s votes? 
I will point out that this is exactly out of the fascist playbook.
I am NOT suggesting SNP was heading that way. Unlike, say, the USA’s Republicans.
But a ruling group united in a zealotry will eventually decide that their need to remain in control to achieve their glittering Mission of National Salvation justifies almost anything. SNP insiders had obviously decided that when facts are inconvenient, simply make up new ones. That’s one of the first steps on a long walk off a short pier.
Only insofar as fascism is an offshoot of nationalism, which is the root of this type of identification of a political movement with the country itself.
So, the next SNP leader is a choice between two loons and a dullard. Was Sturgeon the only grown up in the party?
Quick poll:
- Who believes any of this?
- Whether you answered yes or no, does it strike you as competent political communication?
“I have no idea how many people are actually in my party, and neither does the Chief Executive of the party. We’re both complete idiots in fact. We have to sew labels on our clothes to remember which ones are the pants.”
“Who did you say you are again, anyway…?”
I mean, come on. She’s no idiot and she must know that her answers here are simply not credible. To the extent that parroting that line merely enhances the claims of mismanagement at the top.
Well, today’s the day!
Announcement will come around 2pm UK time.
Last week was relatively low on drama. The main point of interest was Sturgeon’s farewell tour which involved an appearance on Loose Women (a relatively light weight current affairs/culture show), a speech before the Royal Society for Arts Engineering and Industry (a progressive think tank full of people who won’t ask awkward questions because they don’t know enough to) and did not include a session iwth the Scottish Affairs Select Committee - on the grounds she was too busy with the aforementioned - which was the only body likely to be impertinent enough to try to hold her to account.
She did have her final First Minister’s Questions on Thursday, but she has done a lot of these without answering a straight question and she wasn’t about to change now. Both she and SNP did successfully manage to convey the idea that using this session to suggest she might have ever got anything wrong or failed in some way was a terrible faux pas.
However! She is now in the past, and any problems she may have left are for her successor to deal with. We still don’t know who that will be. This isn’t necessarily because it’s too close to call, it’s a general lack of information. We only recently found out how many members the SNP has, after all. Exactly who those members are, what they value and how they view the candidates is something a of a black box. So it might be close, or one candidate might canter to victory.
I saw someone make an interesting point on Twitter about the geographic variation here. Most of Scotland’s population is concentrated in the central belt. (The brightest lit bits in the middle here. NB those aren’t islands to the east, they’re oil fields). This is the urban, industrial or ex-industrial home of not only most Scots but also most people in politics. But it’s not everyone and while geography isn’t entirely destiny it’s true that political priorites and cultural values do vary with location - the people in the bright blob around Aberdeen have perhaps rather different ideas about the merits of drilling for oil, for example. We also have farmers in the borders and a series of small communities in the west Highlands and Islands. It is definitely true, and mildly amusing, that while the SNP rails against power being held in Westminster not Scotland, it is bang in favour of power being held in Edinburgh/Glasgow not Inverness or Dumfries. The centralisation tendency is strong.
Yousaf is the candidate of the central belt - progressive, continuity, establishment, centrality. Forbes is the candidate of the Highlands - conservative values, defensive, disruptive. Regan AFAICT doesn’t have a geographic base.
Just on relative population you have to assume Yousaf has the edge but we don’t really know how members are distributed and certainly pre-breakthrough the SNP strongholds were outside the Central Belt.
For what it’s worth, the latest odds are:
Yousaf: 1.22 (2/9)
Forbes: 4 (3/1)
Regan: 34 (33/1)
That’s a fair reflection of the conventional wisdom, doubtless because conventional wisdom is all we’ve got to go on. (And also, given where Forbes started this campaign, quite astonishing).
Voting is done by transferrable vote: voters can rank candidates 1-3 (although they can also stop at 1 or 2) and if no candidate reaches a majority the one with lowest votes is removed and their preferences redistributed. The race has been sufficiently divisive that it’s hard to imagine, for example, someone saying “I’d prefer Humza but if not Forbes will be a good second choice”, or vice versa. However, Forbes has been making a play for Regan’s second preferences so if there is to be an upset it will likely be in this way: Yousaf doesn’t get over the line, and Regan’s voters push Forbes into first place.
I genuinely don’t have a prediction beyond conventional wisdom; certainly nothing I’d put money on.
Wow - I had no idea the oil rigs are so numerous and (in some cases) large (by which I mean large collections close together, of course - I’m aware there isn’t a single oil rig the size of Edinburgh).
An interesting thread here from an LGBT SNP elected councillor, reflecting on what it will mean if Forbes is elected - and also on the SNPs history with LGBT issues, which until fairly recently was not amazing.
Yeah, it was an eye-opener for me. I mean, I know there’s a lot of oil and I know how they get it, but I didn’t really put it together.
(In Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory, the narrator can see the mirage of reflected light from the rigs from their home in Fife.)
Another fun thing about that map is the lights more or less track Roman settlement in Scotland, which can be found as far north as Aberdeen. But they definitely stuck to the flat bits!
For American readers, it’s basically the UK version of The View.
Uncertainty seems to be the order of the day:
No news but the odds are shifting rapidly (who knows why):
Yousaf; 1.12 (1/4)
Forbes: 2.16 (23/20)
Regan: 28 (27/1)
All 3 of those seem to be shorter odds than on the list you posted earlier - fallacy somewhere?
ETA: If 1/4 is correct for Yousaf, that’s 1.25 in decimal which is slightly longer than earlier - but it seems to me, not enough to account for the significant shortening against Forbes, from 4 to 2.16.
Shouldn’t the implied probabilities add up to just over 100%?
It might be because Oddschecker is taking odds from elsewhere. And I might be slow transcribing.
In any case, in the time since I posted that, Regan has moved out to 63 so that will help balance!
Wisdom of crowds works much better when there is a crowd.
Well, this member of the crowd still thinks it will be Yousaf - the implied odds were wrong about Brexit and some other recent elections, but not by this magnitude I don’t think? On the other hand, as you rightly point out the ‘crowd’ in this case is far, far, smaller - and hence subject to a much greater plausible range.