Tomorrow, the 90-day campaign period prior to E-Day begins. It’s actually less than that, because of the traditional Semana Santa break.
Pulse Asia has just released its numbers (crunched on Jan. 24 to 28) as of this writing. Laylo (this paper’s resident pollster) follows in a day or two.
Pulse Asia’s second week December 2015 ratings had Binay soaring (and recovering) to 33, ahead of the three-pack Poe, Duterte and Roxas. Now it’s Poe at 30, with the three-pack of Binay, Duterte and Roxas in a statistical tie.
What a difference a month and a half could make in a keenly watched election. In end-November, Duterte zoomed in a privately commissioned Social Weather Stations survey to Number One. By mid-December, he was third or fourth. How his fortunes changed, largely on account of a careless remark about the Pope.
Binay was ahead in mid-December at the expense of Poe. Just as the Year of the Monkey unfolds, Pulse says she has recovered part of the numbers Binay had stolen from her. What happened?
It’s not likely because of the conclusion of Koko Pimentel’s Senate hearings on Binay pere et fils. That was ho-hum. The “negative” ads asking Binay to come clean and explain his side had not yet been aired at the time of the survey. Binay has been as busy as anybody else in the campaign, boodle-boodle here and there. And his ads once again took the “masa” bonding approach. Nognog and Pandak. I thought that was pretty good “kurot sa puso.” If Pulse correctly figured the pulse of the masses, then I was wrong. Maybe they looked at themselves in the mirror and said, hindi naman ako nog-nog, at hindi rin ako pandak.
As for Poe, the spotlight was on her travails at the Supreme Court, and weeks before, the “pang-aapi” she got from the Comelec. Cleverly, her promoters chose to release an ad alluding to the SC trial itself, added nostalgia about FPJ once suffering the same, and concludes with “Lumalaban!” followed by “Pero may puso”. That probably did the trick. Kit Tatad said it was an affront to the Court, but then again, the masa do not understand lese majeste.
Mar’s ads during the period had him threatening (albeit indirectly) about the loss of the four Ps or the Pantawid Pamilya dole to the E class. And Philhealth benefits as well. Clearly, these ads did not buy him sympathy. Wise guys in the pondohan sa kanto might have chimed, “Aba, nanakot pa!” He has since changed tack, and in doleful soliloquy still, shown on TV just as February began, described himself as the “trabaho lang” candidate, versus the “pa-awa”, the “siga”, and the well…kawatan, though he cleverly dodged potential libel in the language.
Duterte did nothing. The tandem ads with Alan Cayetano ended with Christmas. I don’t know if his forgettably horrible bowling and tanim-bala ads, were caught by the 24 to 28 January survey period of Pulse. He hardly moved from Davao during the period between Simbang Gabi and the end of January. His numbers are stagnant, at 20 percentage points. And his Metro Manila and Central Visayas numbers dropped.
What are we trying to say? Snapshots, that’s what surveys are. As Mar Roxas properly says, although it sounds like whistling in the dark sometimes, the only survey that matters happens on May 9, 2016.
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The question on many minds is what happens if the magistrates of the highest tribunal think and act like lawyers sworn to uphold the Constitution rather than the bleeding hearts that CJ Sereno and AJ Leonen want them to be?
Where would the disqualified Grace Poe votes go? Who would gain the most, and by how much?
Let’s do the numbers: All four candidates have a base support, seen through consecutive surveys, of anywhere from 15 to 25. Note that Binay rose to 33, and is now back to 23, a sharp 10-point drop, most of which went to Poe, who now rates 30. Roxas and Duterte, who keep sniping at each other, for what useless purpose neither strategic nor even rational, hardly moved.
Are we then to conclude that if Poe is disqualified by the Supreme Court, her 20 base points will transfer to Binay? Maybe, maybe not.
Politics is not simple addition. That simplistic notion, culled from the late Senate President Amang Rodriguez, patriarch of the Nacionalista Party who died before Martial Law was declared, is as passé as the transistor radio. Politics is an algebraic formula. Negative plus positive subtracts, not adds.
The economist Mar should know that. As should everyone else.
If Grace Poe Llamanzares is declared a naturalized citizen by the Supreme Court, she loses even her Senate seat. If the same Court first rules on the residency issue, and states that she lacks the 10-year prior residency requirement, she may stay in the Senate, but she is not qualified to contest the presidency.
If she then backs out, endorses one of the four other remaining candidates, how much of her core support (20 percent conservatively) will she sway to her endorsee? That depends as much on the strength and purpose of her appeal as to the compatibility of the message she and her endorsee espouse. Since she is party-less, it’s not going to be about trapo transferability; it will be about message compatibility.
Whether Grace Poe qualifies or not, it will be a tight race. Assume the Court makes a partial disqualification (residency first, the citizenship debate later, maybe dribbled) by mid-March, she will have roughly just 45 days to make her withdrawal meaningful. If she quietly sulks, her political relevance will be gone, forever.
But the other candidates have to strategically decide what moves to make to capture the plum, whether or not Grace Poe is part of the end equation.