Opposition parties should not allow opinion polls to lull them into a sense of complacency, argues Kaizer M. Nyatsumba

As the countdown to post-apartheid South Africa’s most fiercely-contested local government elections on 3 August intensifies, a national television news channel has taken to broadcasting the results of weekly opinion polls on the likely outcome of the elections. Conducted by the reputable company Ipsos South Africa, the opinion polls have so far shown that, as expected, the race will be very tight in four metropolitan areas: Nelson Mandela Bay, Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni.

For a number of reasons, among them the fact that those are the big metropolitan areas in which the governing African National Congress won by slim majorities in the 2014 general elections, it makes sense that the media and the general public would be particularly curious about the likely outcome of the forthcoming local government elections in those regions. After all, those are the four areas on which the three main political parties – the ANC, the Democratic Alliance (DA) and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) – have focused their efforts disproportionately.

While the August 3 elections will certainly be hard fought across the country, the aforementioned four metropolitan councils will continue to enjoy greater attention from the political contestants and observers alike. Not only are they some of the biggest metropolitan councils in the country, but they are also the cities where a theoretical possibility exists that one or two of the opposition parties could form the new governments in those areas.

The opinion polls broadcast last week indicated that the DA was marginally ahead of the ANC in the polls in the Port Elizabeth, Johannesburg and Tshwane areas. As the ANC gets even more consumed with internal battles following unhappiness over the completion of its candidates’ lists, there is an even higher probability that some of the organisation’s members and supporters might tell pollsters, in anger, that they do not plan to vote for it in August in an effort to put pressure on their leaders. Conversely, there is also likely to be a higher probability of people telling pollsters that they would vote for the DA or even the EFF on election day because of their feelings of anger or disappointment with the terrible state of governance or the economy in the country at the moment.

Should the current, pre-election trend of the Ipsos opinion polls remain the same, a concerned ANC will have no choice but to redouble its campaign efforts in those cities in order to increase its chances of holding onto those important metropolitan councils. Although the trend is unlikely to induce complacency on the part of the DA and the EFF, nevertheless there remains a possibility that psychologically these opposition parties may begin to tell themselves that they will take those councils come 3 August.

More importantly, however, even if DA and EFF leaders and candidates in those areas did not find themselves lulled by the poll results into some complacency, there is a higher probability that some of those parties’ supporters might have a false sense of comfort and, in the end, abstain from voting on election day or even vote for a different party in the mistaken belief that their preferred parties would walk the polls.

Apart from these considerations, it is also important to keep in mind that, interesting though they are, opinion polls are not an infallible soothsayer. Psephology is not an exact science. A number of examples come to mind, with the latest being that of the outcome of last week’s British referendum on its European Union membership.

Although in the run-up to last week’s referendum polls indicated consistently that the vote was too close to call, in the last few days the polls showed that the “Stay” vote would carry the day. Indeed, so confident was the international community of a “Stay” vote that the 52% Brexit decision came as a big shock.

Major British pollsters, including Ipsos MORI, had predicted an 8% victory margin for the Stay campaign, and the Financial Times predicted a 55%-45% vote in favour of remaining within the EU.

In the run-up to the 1992 general elections in the same country, all opinion polls consistently predicted victory for Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party against John Major’s Conservative Party. The Labour Party was forecast to win by such a huge margin that, exactly a week before the elections, on 1 April the party held A Victory Rally at the Sheffield Arena to celebrate its anticipated victory. A research associate at the European Institute for the Media at the University of Manchester at the time, I travelled to Sheffield to attend the rally.

On the day of the elections, The Sun, the biggest, Conservative Party-supporting tabloid newspaper in that country which deeply resented a possible Labour victory, carried on its front page the headline: “If Kinnock wins today, will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights”. Although scaremongering, nevertheless it was a headline that conceded the much-expected Labour Party victory.

And yet, to every pundit’s surprise, the Labour Party suffered a stunning defeat in those elections and John Major went on to serve his first full term as Prime Minister. As The Independent reported in a subsequent analysis of the pre-election polls: “The result, when it came on 9 April, was one that nobody, not even the Tories, had expected.”

Many years earlier, something similar happened in the presidential elections of 1948 in the USA. In those elections, conventional wisdom, supported by opinion polls, held that Democratic Party incumbent Harry S. Truman was heading for a defeat to Republican challenger and New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey. Again, so strongly did the polls favour Dewey that, on 3 November 1948, the Chicago Daily Tribune carried a prominent front-page headline loudly proclaiming: “Dewey Defeats Truman”. The accompanying story was written by the paper’s veteran Washington Correspondent and political analyst Arthur Sears Henning, who had correctly predicted the winner in four out of five presidential elections in the previous 20 years.

Therefore, while opposition parties like the DA can be encouraged by the weekly Ipsos poll findings broadcast on the television news network, they will do well not to allow themselves to be lulled into a false sense of comfort and complacency. After all, psephology is not an exact science. Elections are won on election day, and not before votes are cast.

A former newspaper Editor and political analyst, Kaizer M. Nyatsumba is a senior business executive based in Johannesburg.

Posted on: 27 June 2016 | Author: Kaizer Nyatsumba