THE May 9 presidential election will be between Vice President Jejomar Binay and former Interior Secretary Manuel Roxas II but Binay, the United Nationalist Alliance standard bearer, will have a lead of more than 10 percent or more than four million votes against the Liberal Party candidate, UNA said Monday.
UNA secretary-general JV Bautista said Binay had the full support of the 12.1-million poor Filipinos who comprised more than a fourth of the Philippine population of nearly 97 million.
“The lower middle class who earn less than P20,000 a month and wanting to get a higher take-home pay support Binay’s program of abolishing the income tax of workers earning less than P30,000 a month,” UNA said.
The biggest concentration of the middle class is in Luzon, especially in Metro Manila, and neighboring Calabarzon (Cavite, Laguna, Batangas and Quezon) and Central Luzon.
In a radio interview, Binay expressed confidence he would win the 2016 presidential elections by a landslide of four million votes against Roxas, whom he defeated in the 2010 vice presidential elections.
Binay, whose poll rating has slid from first to third place, said he would win the election.
He claimed they had already calculated their solid votes in the Visayas, Luzon and the grassroots in Metro Manila.
Binay recalled that in 2010 he won with 14,645,574 votes against Roxas’ 13,918,490 votes, or a lead of only 727,084 votes.
Bautista said Roxas would only win the elections through cheating.
He said Roxas’ other rivals—Senator Grace Poe and Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte—had only started making local alliances and were only banking on the popularity of their names.