BEWARE IRRATIONAL POLLSTER EXUBERANCE
A rash of polls suggesting a dramatic plunge in ANC support should be treated with caution
How do we make sense of the proliferation of polls ahead of the May 29 elections, most of them reflecting an apocalyptic outcome for the ANC?
Pollsters declare their results are not predictions but snapshots in time of voter sentiment. But at the same time, polls can sway people in deciding who to vote for on the day, so they do matter.
While it’s hard to gauge their accuracy, they are useful guidelines for academics, analysts and investors in drafting scenarios for the future. Those the FM has canvassed say some of the polling we have seen so far appears to be “really bad” or even “purposefully biased”, with a smattering of “good” surveys.
Polls should therefore be treated with caution — as the South African National Editors Forum this week urged news organisations to do.
There are other ways to gauge the political temperature, from being aware of the mood on the street to analysing previous national and provincial election results.
The ANC’s share of the vote nationally has gone like this: 62.7% in 1994, 66.4% in 1999, 69.6% in 2004,
65.9% in 2009, 62.2% in 2014 and 57.2% in 2019. The decline since 2009 has largely been incremental, so to suggest a precipitous plunge of more than 15 percentage points for the ANC this year to about 40%, as some polls do, seems extreme to say the least.
Polls predicting a dramatic showing for Jacob
Zuma’s MK Party also seem to be at odds with trends in previous elections. For one thing, Zuma is not a freshly minted candidate. The ANC’s decline in electoral support happened on his watch. So he is hardly a big vote-catcher for the ordinary citizen — just the opposite, in fact, as far as the ANC was concerned in 2018.
He does have support among tribalists, tenderpreneurs and organised criminals. But whether he can snatch even 10% of the vote in the upcoming polls (significantly more than even the EFF could muster in its inaugural election) is doubtful.
Academics have conducted extensive research into assessing what makes the local electorate tick.
One such study by Collette Schulz-Herzenberg of Stellenbosch University and Robert Mattes of the University of Strathclyde — “It Takes Two to Toyi-Toyi: One-party dominance and opposition party failure in South Africa’s 2019 national election ”— was published in June last year.
The study, a post-election assessment of why voters took the decisions they did, looked at voters who supported the ANC in 2014 but changed their vote in 2019 or decided not to vote at all.
It found that voters in this group were more likely to back an opposition party in 2019 if they viewed this party as more “competent (their ability to govern)” than the ANC, or if they rated the opposition party’s leading candidate more favourably than President Cyril Ramaphosa.
But racial perceptions also played a role those voters who viewed the DA (with perceived competence) as “inclusive” or “representative of all South Africans” were seven times more likely to switch their vote. The problem for the DA was that in 2019, very few 2014 ANC voters viewed it as inclusive.
Has this perception changed since then, given the exodus of senior black leaders?
Interestingly, according to the study, this “inclusivity” consideration was not at play for voters who switched to a “pro-black party” such as the EFF. Still, the study notes that divisive politics something the EFF and MK Party have been accused of turns voters off.
“Indeed, previous studies have shown that voter perceptions of whether political parties are inclusive (representative of all South Africans) or exclusive (representative of one group only) exercise an important influence on the vote. Negative images of parties as racially or ethnically exclusive enclaves overwhelmingly repel voters,” it said.
The study grappled with the fact that despite the widespread corruption, state capture and decay in governance under Zuma, the ANC still managed to obtain the largest share of the popular vote six in 10 voters voted for it regardless in 2019.
It found that voters rated parties on competence, candidates and inclusivity and that very few opposition parties had beaten the ANC in all three categories, persuading many disgruntled ANC voters to stay at home on polling day.
So the ANC’s continued dominance told the story not of its own strength, but of the failure of opposition parties to capitalise on disaffection among the ruling party’s usual supporters.
There are new factors this time around, to add variety to the same old load-shedding woes and stagnant economy: a host of new opposition parties, independent candidates, three ballot papers, the aftermath of a pandemic, a looming water crisis. But in some respects the fresh options are not fresh at all: Zuma and Mmusi Maimane (Build One South Africa) are cases in point.
No party leader rates more favourably among the electorate than Ramaphosa at the moment which is probably why the EFF and MK Party have based their campaigns on trying to tear him down.
What is clear is that while the elections will bring change, the shift may not be nearly as earthshaking as opinion polls are suggesting.
The only reliable gauge will be the leaderboard at the Electoral Commission of South Africa results centre at the end of May.
There are new factors this time around, to add variety to the same old load-shedding woes and stagnant economy