2026 SNP Election Strategy: Core Vote meets Ming Vase

On the eve of the party’s ‘Campaign Conference’ in Edinburgh, our Founder and Director, Mark Diffley, takes readers through the SNP’s likely election strategy as polling day rapidly approaches.

The SNP gathers in Edinburgh this weekend for its ‘Campaign Conference’ knowing that, barring a late swing with 55 days until the election, polling suggests the party will win a fifth consecutive Holyrood election and herald a third decade in power.

Sure, the party has lost around a quarter of its vote share in the last five years (recording 48% in 2021 and currently polling at an average of 35%), but the double whammy of Reform UK’s emergence in Scotland (currently polling on average at 18%) and the disintegration of support for Labour (losing half of those who backed the party at the 2024 general election), means that the SNP will still likely emerge with a seat share close to an overall majority.

Indeed, support for the SNP has been stubbornly consistent; every poll since December 2024 shows that between 33% and 37% intend to vote for the party on the constituency ballot. This gives the party a sense of confidence around where the floor, and indeed the ceiling, is for the coming election, in other words a core vote who look certain to vote SNP in May.

This will impact on how the party approaches its messaging and communication in the run-up to May. The issue of independence is an interesting case study here. Readers of our quarterly Understanding Scotland  series will have noted that, when it comes to issue salience, only around 1 in 10 mention the constitution among their top priorities. However, work we conducted for Scottish Environment LINK shows that 40% of those favourable to the SNP mention independence as a priority, a figure that would likely be higher among core SNP supporters. The demise of the small but fiercely pro-independence Alba Party gives the SNP an additional reason to be talking up the issue ahead of the vote.

So, when we look at the agenda for this weekend’s conference, in which independence features heavily, or consider the extent to which the issue is increasingly talked up by the First Minister and others, it is part of a strategy not just to appeal to the core vote, but to motivate it to turn out at the polling stations in May.

Alongside a core vote strategy, the lack of significant change in SNP support in the last 15 months will encourage the party to pursue another of those political maxims, the so-called ‘Ming Vase’ strategy.  A key feature of UK Labour’s 2024 campaign, this approach emphasises that a party will promote minimal policy detail in an effort to maintain current support and avoid scaring off voters to other parties.

With stubborn polls and time running out for other parties to make the election more competitive, the SNP will maximise continuity and stability and minimise risk, hoping to get the Ming Vase over the line intact, and their approach is likely to combine an emphasis on independence to motivate the core with minimal risk to scare voters away.

Of course for the other parties, the strategy needs to be the exact opposite if they are going to change the weather, but with under seven week left, time is running short.