Publicus latest survey shows Marcos with 57%, Leni 21%
Presidential aspirant Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. has maintained his wide lead over other candidates with less than three weeks before the May 9 elections, results of the latest pre-election survey conducted by PUBLiCUS between April 19 to 21 showed.
At least 57 percent of the 1,500 registered Filipino voters who participated in the PAHAYAG National Tracker: April Survey chose Marcos as their presidential bet.
Marcos’ voters’ preference rating was two percentage points higher than his 55 percent in the March 9 to 14 survey of PUBLiCUS.
“Marcos is the only presidential candidate who has notched a statistically significant increase in voter preference during the campaign period. He has gained 5 percentage points over the past two months after notching an initial preference share of 52 percent in our February survey,” said Aureli Sinsuat, Executive Director of PUBLiCUS.
Vice President Leni Robredo’s presidential preference numbers, on the other hand, have consistently hovered between 20 to 23 percent in the six pre-election surveys conducted by PUBLiCUS between October 2021 and the third week of April 2022.
The latest survey showed 21 percent of the respondents saying they would vote for Robredo.
Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte-Carpio also continued to lead the vice-presidential race, with 59 percent of the vote among respondents.
Sinsuat said Duterte-Carpio has also notched a significant 5 percentage point increase in voter preference since the second week of February when she earned a preference share of 54 percent.
Senator Francis “Kiko” Pangilinan and Senate President Vicente “Tito” Sotto III are statistically tied for second place after notching preference shares of 15 percent and 9 percent, respectively.
Respondents to the non-commissioned nationwide purposive sampling survey were randomly drawn by the Singapore office of American firm PureSpectrum from its market research panel of over 200,000 Filipinos.
The final survey panel was restricted to registered voters. Parameters based on respondent age, gender, and location were also utilized in the sample formulation in order for the resulting sample to conform more closely to the features of the voting population, as defined by statistics from the Commission on Elections.
The nationwide margin of error is +/- 3 percent.
Earlier, the chief data scientist of PUBLiCUS, Dr. David Yap Jr., said there is a low possibility of voters switching preference at this point.
“People are set, people have preferences and people have personalities,” Yap said.
“You just don’t come up to them and alter their entire opinions. These are things that you have to consider,” he added.
But for Dr. Ronald Holmes, president of Pulse Asia Research Inc., there is a possibility that the numbers in the survey results may still change before election day.
“There is a possibility of change. You cannot rule out change because there are certain events that transpire that we cannot, in any way, predict that may eventually change people’s voting decision,” Holmes said.
“It’s hard to predict. Certain events may transpire from now until May 9. We don’t know whether those are events that would shift or reinforce the voting preferences,” he added.
Dr. Guido David, fellow of OCTA Research, said based strictly on what the surveys are showing, there is already a significant lead of the front-runner in the presidential race.