The final polls – and the visible jitters among the British elite – gave the yes side confidence that they were on course for victory.
Sturgeon said voters were subject to an "onslaught of fear-mongering" after a second YouGov poll gave the yes side a lead.
The value of major Scottish companies has fallen by billions of pounds after the stock market was spooked by polling giving the yes vote a lead ahead of the referendum.
The yes campaign had been keen to agree a date closer to the referendum on 18 September, hoping Salmond could give the yes vote a lift in the closing stages.
However, Cameron would not have enjoyed the strained Balmoral breakfast 11 days before the Scottish independence referendum, with all the papers laid out reporting a YouGov poll giving the yes vote the lead.
On that trip, there was a particular focus on the referendum when the campaign was electrified by the publication of another poll, a Sunday Times/YouGov survey on 7 September, the final day of the prime minister's Balmoral visit, which gave the yes side its first lead – by 51% to 49%.
Though it's the party base for whom she needs to give the "yes" answer; presumably this won't preclude her from trying to persuade the superdelegates that it's a "no".8 17 : I think ABC recycled their "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" set for the debate tonight.
It notably gave the yes campaign an electrifying and ultimately erroneous lead during the Scottish independence referendum and its 2015 general election eve poll had Tories and Labour neck and neck on 34% when the Conservatives won with a clear seven-point lead the next day.
Some 71% of those who have decided backed the Salmond compared with 29% who backed Darling, giving the yes campaign a crucial lift just as about 750,000 postal votes for the referendum are due to be sent out on Tuesday and Wednesday.
It's the difference between giving the "yes, but" response and the "yes, and" response.
Half of the participants had to give the yes-response to action-related verbs and the no-response to non action verbs in the semantic task, while in the syllabic task the yes-response was to correspond to 3-syllable verbs and the no-response to 2- or 4-syllable verbs.
