The deciding factors in the 2022 elections
The deciding factors in the 2022 elections
February 8, 2022
By John Nery
Ninety days out, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is acting like the overwhelming favorite to win the presidential election: selecting his interviews, evading debates, avoiding conflict. That these play to his own weaknesses (he is not known as a diligent, policy-oriented confrontational debater) must come as both relief and vindication; he is campaigning for president exactly the way he wants to.
This is possible largely because he and his running mate Mayor Sara Duterte both enjoy a commanding lead in the surveys. If the results were otherwise, he would necessarily find himself accepting all sorts of interviews, showing up at debates, breaking his own vow of unity to face (and face down) rivals.
Will the surveys then be one of the deciding factors, or even the crucial decisive one, that will shape the 2022 vote? The answer must be no – because scientific surveys only reflect public opinion. As I have written before, the “great democratic paradox at the heart of the entire survey enterprise” is that scientific surveys accurately reflect public opinion because “they do not in fact influence public opinion.” To use Social Weather Stations terms, the few who are “bandwagonners” (voters who change their mind to join the bandwagon of the front runner) cancel out the few who are “underdoggers” (voters who change their mind to side with the underdog). Survey results reflect public opinion at a particular moment in time, and that moment is shaped not by surveys but by other factors. It might be useful to think of surveys not as the message but rather as the messenger.
I still have to see the results of the January 2022 Pulse Asia survey, but I’ve seen the main numbers in two internal surveys conducted in January, and these messengers show that the gap between Marcos and Vice President Leni Robredo, in second place, is narrowing. But it is not narrowing by as much as a voter saturated in political media would think. Why is that so?
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