NATASHA MARRIAN: Pollsters’ predictions for the 2024 elections are in
The reputable pollsters are unanimous that the ANC won’t win a majority next year — but the predictions for the DA and the EFF are all over the place.
Politics can be inexplicable and apparently irrational — how did Jacob Zuma manage to lead the oldest liberation movement on the continent for two terms? — but in the final analysis it’s a numbers game. And polls conducted in the run-up to elections by reputable organisations are grounded in maths and usually provide a reliable gauge of voter sentiment.
Research companies will give a margin of error for their polls, and they rarely predict an election outcome with 100% accuracy. But the insights they provide into the mood of the electorate are crucial.
Psychologically these polls are significant — and those held in South Africa this year must have been giving ANC loyalists heart palpitations.
It’s instructive to look back at how the polling outfits performed last time around, in 2019 — something that BusinessTech helpfully did.
In that election, several voter surveys predicted that the ANC would get between 50% and 60% of the vote; the average was in the region of 56.4%. In the end, the ANC finished with 57.5%.
The pre-election polls in 2019 generally underestimated support for the DA, predicting on average that it would sink to 18.5%; it actually won 20.5%. And they overestimated support for the EFF, pegging it between 11% and 15%; in the end, the EFF got 10.8%.
Most polls predicted that the ANC would fall below 60%, but almost all were off by two to three percentage points with the DA and the EFF. The most accurate poll was Intellidex’s, which predicted that the ANC would win 57.4% and the DA 20.7%. But it forecast an overgenerous 11.5% for the EFF.
In the past two months there has been a proliferation of polls — by Ipsos, the Brenthurst Foundation, the Social Research Foundation (SRF), the Centre for Risk Analysis (CRA) and the Institute for Race Relations (IRR). This time around, the predictions vary widely, likely due to different modelling for turnout and for allocating undecided votes. Nonetheless, there does seem to be a common trend.
The ANC is forecast to win 43% by Ipsos, 41% by the Brenthurst Foundation, 45% by the SRF, and 46.5% by both the CRA and the IRR. So there is a strong likelihood that the ANC will fall below 50% for the first time.
The DA gets figures of 20% (Ipsos), 23% (the Brenthurst Foundation), 26.1% (CRA and IRR) and 31% (SRF).
The DA, as you might expect, doesn’t think much of the Ipsos result. Leon Schreiber, strategy and communication adviser to John Steenhuisen, tells the FM that Ipsos polling has consistently got it wrong with the DA. (Incidentally, the party’s internal polling was off by three percentage points in 2019, and just one point in 2021.)
The predictions for the EFF are all over the place. Ipsos puts the party at 18%, a near eight percentage point surge since 2019. The Brenthurst Foundation puts the EFF at 17%, the SRF says 9% and the IRR predicts 11.6%.
A closer look at the predictions in 2019 shows there was a big difference between the survey results then and the party’s actual vote count. There is a relatively simple explanation — the EFF’s support base is largely made up of young voters and those casting protest votes.
Both classes of voter are relatively unpredictable. Younger voters, research shows, do not turn out to vote as consistently as other age groups, so while they may back Julius Malema in a survey, it doesn’t mean they will make their X on a ballot paper. And there are clear signs that the protest vote will be a key feature for the EFF next year.
For instance, there are the disgruntled ANC members who continue to back Zuma, and they are likely to throw their weight behind the EFF. This faction is epitomised by the likes of Busisiwe Mkhwebane and Mzwanele Manyi, who have joined the EFF and been sworn in as MPs. There are likely to be many more such defectors before the elections.
This disgruntled vote could especially help the EFF in KwaZulu-Natal, North West, the Free State and Mpumalanga. The latter three were the strongholds of the pro-Zuma “premier league”: Supra Mahumapelo, Ace Magashule and David Mabuza.
The EFF has positioned itself as the natural home of the RET faction, but this might not be much of a drawcard. Rank-and-file ANC members and South Africans generally have, in the years since 2019, increasingly turned their backs on Zuma and the RET group.
Whether the EFF’s RET lookalike image will give it a substantial boost is one of the burning questions in what’s shaping up to be an electric election.
This article originally appeared on Business LIVE