The press and social media today are frothing with excitement about a new Ipsos Mori poll for STV which shows (for the second poll in succession) Ruth Davidson scoring marginally higher approval ratings than Nicola Sturgeon.

But the problem is that that wasn’t what people were actually asked.

This is the actual question in the poll:

“Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way Ruth Davidson is doing her job as leader of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party?”

And there are a whole bunch of obvious problems with that. Because if you asked us that question, we honestly wouldn’t have a clue how to answer it.

We don’t like Ruth Davidson or the Tories and we don’t want the Tories to be in power. So should we be “satisfied” that she’s got them in a position where their support is just 21% and there’s no chance of them winning an election? You could argue perfectly reasonably that from a partisan viewpoint we should be very satisfied indeed.

As an alert reader perceptively noted on Twitter, it’s a bit like asking Scotland fans if they’re satisfied with Joe Hart’s performance as England goalkeeper.

On the other hand, we could look at it rather more dispassionately and say that she’s unquestionably doing the job of a Conservative leader well – she’s increased their support by six points in a year (which looked at another way is a whopping great 40% increase on the previous figure, from 15% at the 2015 election to 21% in this May’s), doubled their seats at Holyrood and overtaken Labour as the main opposition party.

So we could legitimately answer every possible option to that question (satisfied, dissatisfied or don’t know). It’s a very badly-worded and ambiguous bit of polling. But whichever answer we gave wouldn’t mean that Ruth Davidson was “popular” with us – we still wouldn’t like her either way.

And that’s before you get to the fact that the question isn’t comparing like with like. Because the Nicola Sturgeon version goes like this:

“Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way Nicola Sturgeon is doing her job as First Minister of Scotland?”

Asking whether someone is doing well for their country isn’t the same thing as asking whether they’re doing well for their party. Our view, for example, is that anything that’s good for the Scottish Conservatives is almost certainly bad for Scotland. Other people will have other views. But either way they’re two fundamentally different questions.

So you’re asking two different questions about two different people, neither of which have any connection to “popularity”, and which are highly ambiguous and confusing in themselves, and then the media is reporting that the resulting mess of unrelated data proves one of the people is more popular than the other.

(And rather oddly, Ipsos haven’t included party allegiances in the results, so we can’t even tell if any of the leaders is doing surprisingly well with supporters of other parties, and if so which ones, or whether the poll’s been properly weighted for party support. The technical notes certainly make no mention of weighting by allegiance.)

So what we’ve got here is terrible polling, terrible reporting of the terrible polling, and hopelessly confused members of the public trying to make sense of it all somewhere in the middle. Welcome to Scottish politics 2016, everyone.