THE NUMBER of people who don’t know how they’ll vote in indyref2 is likely being massively under-reported, one of the country’s top pollsters has claimed.

Speaking at the Progress Scotland fringe event at the SNP conference, Mark Diffley said that people were “changing their minds on how they’ll vote, on an almost a daily basis.”

Diffley said the YouGov poll published in the Times on Saturday, which showed support for Yes at 49% and No at 51%, had the highest number of “don’t knows” in an indyref poll for several years.

He told the audience: “It was 10% of people, and that’s on the binary issue, that’s just asking if there was a referendum tomorrow how you would vote.

“And I think that’s interesting because if you look back on polls from a few months ago, it was as little as 4, 5, 6%.

“Even on the binary issue, polls are picking up that there’s a much greater fluidity.”

He added that Progress’s own research suggested around half of all undecided voters needed to see what would happen with Brexit before making their mind up.

“When we asked about the interaction between Brexit and independence, we found that around half of all total undecided voters were waiting to see the impact of Brexit before deciding which way they were going to vote,” Diffley said.

Angus Robertson, the managing director of Progress Scotland, said the company would soon be holding focus groups in a bid to dig down further into why different groups of voters find themselves floating between Yes and No.

He said there was already some awareness of key groups who had been left cold by independence in 2014.

“Yes under-performed amongst older voters, Yes under-performed amongst European citizens, Yes under-performed amongst people born elsewhere in the UK.

“And I think there is a larger and over-arching group, which is people who feel they have something.

“I’m not sure I know exactly what the best way, or the technical way of describing this group is, because they may not actually have very much, but they may have worked very hard for that not very much and that matters to them.

“I think we do need to understand that group. I think that some of the thinking that went in to the Sustainable Growth Commission is trying to get our head around some of the issues that touched that group in particular.”

Robertson told delegates that when it comes to undecided voters, campaigners needed to do more reassuring and less shouting loudly.

He said he had been struck by the response to a video of David Edward, the former UK judge on the European Court of Justice, who said he was now considering supporting independence.

“He finished by saying that for him to complete that journey, or end that indecision and vote for Yes, he would need to have greater assurance and reassurance around a number of things – Scotland’s economic future, around how an independent Scotland would be administered, about the intellectual capacity to manage the process.

“Somebody tweeted, ‘cannae believe it, all we’re hearing is that we’re too wee, poor and stupid stuff again’, and I thought to myself, ‘you have totally missed the point in this’.”

The meeting came as a new Panelbase survey, published in the Sunday Times, put support for independence at 47%, but that would jump to 51% for Yes in a soft Brexit, and 59% in a hard Brexit.