Friday 3rd May, 2024

Much is being spoken these days in Sri Lanka about voting intention surveys. Their findings are flaunted by some presidential aspirants in a bid to bolster their claims and counterclaims. But even those with a nodding acquaintance with psephology will see that it is too early to gauge popular support for any presidential candidate, much less make predictions about elections, with the help of opinion survey results.

Public opinion and perceptions do not readily lend themselves to quantification. Hence there could be many inaccuracies in opinion survey results. There have been numerous instances where predictions based on the findings of public opinion surveys, etc., went wrong.

Harry Truman won the US presidential election in 1948 although opinion surveys had predicted victory for his rival, Thomas E. Dewey. In 2016, many polls on Brexit predicted a narrow win for the ‘Remain’ campaign, but the opposite of that prediction came true. In 2015, David Cameron became the British Prime Minister, proving many pollsters wrong; they had predicted a hung parliament. In 2020, pre-election polls indicated a close race between the National Party and the Labour Party in New Zealand, but Labour under Jacinda Arden’s leadership, scored a landslide victory.

In 2014, most of the pre-election surveys underestimated the level of popular support for Narendra Modi and predicted only a narrow win for the BJP, which however scored a stunning victory. Ahead of the 2021 German federal election, opinion polls failed to predict the impressive performance of the Social Democratic Party. In Sri Lanka, it was claimed in the run-up to the 2015 presidential election that Maithripala Sirisena was committing political hara-kiri by vying with the then President Mahinda Rajapaksa for the presidency.

Pre-poll surveys predicted a comfortable win for Rajapaksa. All state intelligence agencies, which do political work, also said in their confidential reports that Rajapaksa would win. Those predictions as well as astrological advice made Rajapaksa advance the presidential election. But Sirisena pulled off an upset win.

Meanwhile, the presidential election campaigns of President Ranil Wickremesinghe, Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa and JVP/NPP Leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake, have already peaked, and show signs of plateauing. It will be an uphill task to maintain their momentum in the next few months, given the unpredictable nature of political dynamics, unexpected swings in public opinion and unforeseen circumstances that are beyond the candidates’ control.

Election campaigns are like marathons, where only experienced endurance runners know how to pace themselves properly and achieve success. There is no guarantee that one can win an election by launching one’s poll campaign before all others. It may be recalled that President Mahinda Rajapaksa embarked on his campaign to secure a third term immediately after his victory in the 2010 presidential race, but Sirisena, who entered the fray towards the end of 2014, took only about 40 days to come from behind to beat Rajapaksa in the race.

All presidential candidates are heavily dependent on social media to get ahead of others. But social media content does not necessarily reflect public opinion, for it is manipulated. Inflated metrics have become the order of the day in this digital age. Click farms which take contracts for improving or destroying images of individuals and organisations are in overdrive these days, and according to our sources, they charge as much as five million rupees for two-week campaigns each.

These online engagement manipulation operations are aimed at influencing public opinion; they are even employed to mobilise flash mobs or trigger and sustain ‘leaderless’ protests. So, one should not go by social media content alone in drawing conclusions about possible outcomes of elections.

We commented on the predicament of a New Zealand politician about two decades ago. Believing in a pre-poll survey prediction that he would win hands down, Keith Locke of the Green Party became so cocky that he swore at a public rally that he would run along the streets in his hometown naked if his opponent won the seat. He lost the election, and came under pressure to fulfil his pledge.

He made good on his promise, but had himself covered with a body painting and wore a G-string! So, our presidential hopefuls would be well advised not to make the same mistake as Locke, or they had better have G-strings ready!