Survey shows elections too close to call
A PUBLIC opinion survey conducted by the Herald magazine shows that the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) enjoys a slim lead at the national level over the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN).
This lead of four percentage points, however, is outside the survey’s national margin of error — + 1.3 percentage points — and does not take into account the fact that 13 per cent of the respondents remain undecided. The PML-N, in turn, is leading the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) by 5 percentage points.
Election 2018 survey results: And the winner is...
In the election’s main battleground, Punjab, the survey shows a competitive race: PML-N has a province-wide lead of 7 percentage points over PTI which is outside the survey’s provincial margin of error of +1.9 percentage points.
What, however, is of concern for PML-N, and gives hope to PTI, is that outside central Punjab, the former’s 5 percentage points lead lies within the survey’s margin of error of + 2.6 percentage points in this region. This, combined with the fact that this region accounts for 55 per cent of the province’s National Assembly seats, makes the contest between the two parties a real cliffhanger.
What, however, is missing in the current debate on elections in Punjab is that the final result will depend on how the undecided voters finally choose to cast their ballot and also how many voters turn out to vote on polling day.
The Herald survey finds that 14 per cent of the respondents in Punjab remain undecided. It is this group of voters that will clearly determine the final result of the 2018 election.
This finding is consistent with the polls conducted by Gallup and Pulse Consultants during May 2018 which also show that undecided voters hold the election in Punjab in the balance.
The survey shows that 42 per cent of the respondents in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa support PTI.
To win a majority in the province, therefore, PTI has to swing a substantial portion of the undecided voters to its side. PML-N, too, will need to ensure that a large part of these voters ultimately vote for it. To achieve these goals, the two parties will have to ensure a healthy turnout of their supporters at the polling booths.
The survey shows strong voting intentions among the supporters of both the parties. Approximately 70 per cent of their supporters have reported a ‘strong’ or ‘very strong’ intent to vote.
A bigger challenge for both of them is that a much smaller portion of the undecided voters in Punjab (52 per cent) reports a ‘strong’ or ‘very strong’ intent to vote. Being able to get these voters out on polling day will be the real organisational test for the two parties.
It is also important to underscore here that support for different parties as shown in the survey does not allow a forecast of the number of seats that each party can win. This is because of two key reasons.
Firstly, how support for different parties as reported by the survey translates into vote shares at the national level depends on which way the 13 per cent undecided voters swing and which party can motivate its supporters to turn out in larger numbers on polling day to vote.
Secondly, the number of seats a party wins depends on how concentrated or spread out its support base is across constituencies. Because the survey sample is not representative at the constituency level, it is not possible to estimate whether and by how much the support bases for different parties are concentrated or spread out.
Outside Punjab, PML-N is facing another challenge: shile 40 per cent of the survey respondents in the province support the party, backing for it falls dramatically in other provinces. It has 10 per cent support in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 11 per cent in Balochistan and only 4 per cent in Sindh.
To have a chance of forming the next federal government, it has to not only hold on to its lead in central Punjab but also win by more than a slim margin in the province’s districts outside this region.
The big question for the party is what effect Nawaz Sharif’s incarceration — and that of his daughter Maryam Nawaz Sharif — will have on the undecided voters in Punjab. Unfortunately, the timing of the survey precludes the possibility of assessing this effect.