In an electoral campaign, "peaking" is probably the most important consideration. A candidate should hit peak support as close as possible to election day. That will optimize conversion of popularity into votes.
When a candidate peaks too early and then experiences an erosion in voter support, it will be more difficult to recover lost ground. A subsiding campaign is many times more difficult to restart.
For purposes of this analysis, I will refer to the numbers from SWS and Pulse Asia. There is a third survey group: Ibon Foundation. But there are several reasons why I do not look at the Ibon results at all.
First, Ibon does not use the only company capable to doing demographically accurate random sampling nationwide. This company is used by all the other major polling organizations.
Second, Ibon belongs to an ideological camp and is tainted by its ideological agenda. It sometimes seems that Ibon feeds out its questioners to cadres of KMU and Gabriela and other such groups.
Third, previous Ibon surveys have been way off the mark. Election surveys, unlike other opinion polls, may be finally tested against actual election results. That is a harsh but definitive test of a survey organization’s mettle.
The SWS and Pulse Asia surveys put PGMA and FPJ at a statistical tie. Both, incidentally, show PGMA surging strongly to the front and marginally leading her rival.
The numbers put out by both rank Raul Roco and Panfilo Lacson at a far third and farther fourth, respectively. Eddie Villanueva and Eddie Gil are way below and, short of a miracle, put them outside realistic contention.
The way the numbers are stacked, it seems that the battle for the top is exclusively between PGMA and FPJ. Roco and Lacson seem to be engaged in their own battle for third place. Villanueva and Gil are locked in their own acrimonious battle for fifth place.
Both Raul Roco and Panfilo Lacson began campaigning in early 2003. Both may have already peaked.
Lacson has fairly stable base, ranging from 9 percent to 12 percent of voters. His campaign is saddled by a large bloc of voters (about 25 precent) who report that they will never vote for the candidate under any condition. That is a large negative that might be difficult to hurdle.
Roco hit his highest voter preference rating at about 27 percent. In the last SWS survey, he rated 17 percent. He rated even lower in the comparable Pulse Asia survey.
In this case, the erosion is quite glaring. Once the frontrunner, Roco appears to have lost a third of his maximum voter base ahead of the campaign midpoint. He has lost the ABC voters most heavily.
Fortunately for Roco, he commands the Bicol vote. In the absence of a party organization of any significant size, his firm regional voting base prevents his candidacy from being blown off the deck by the onslaught of the rival campaigns.
The record in previous elections shows Bicolano voters to be the most "tribal": independent of party and programs, they vote for their own. Unfortunately for Roco, the Bicolano base vote is insufficient to define national outcomes. Worse, he is actively opposed by some of the important political lords in his own bailiwick region.
That is not the truly bad news for the Roco campaign. This campaign will have to fight the migration of voters from Roco to PGMA.
Both Roco and President Gloria are appealing to the same constituency – excepting, of course, the tribal Bicolano vote. They are appealing to the younger, better informed, more cosmopolitan, more forward-looking sections of voters.
That constituency is deathly afraid of FPJ winning because this will spell a return of incompetence at the top of government and resurrects images of another Erap. Because of this consideration, an increasing number would rather vote for the candidate better capable of stopping the barbarians at the gate.
Although Roco refuses to publicly address this "tactical voting" factor hounding his bid, the number show clearly that the voters he lost President Gloria gained in the first weeks of the campaign.
President Gloria’s campaign correctly concentrated on consolidating her hold among ABC voters in the first trimester of the campaign. She now leads her closest rival among the D voters. From there, the campaign can now shift from wooing the Roco voters to wooing the FPJ voters at the E class where the actor holds a large lead.
Regionally, PGMA leads Poe two-to-one in the Visayas and, surprisingly, leads the actor by a statistically significant margin in Mindanao. She trails Poe in the NCR and the rest of Luzon.
The strategic direction of her campaign is clearly dictated by the voter preference distribution: break even in Luzon and swamp the challenger with the Visayas vote. To achieve that, she must break Roco’s stranglehold over the Bicolano vote and win support from E voters in the metropolitan area where they are heavily concentrated.
The media play following the Supreme Court decision in the Poe citizenship issue should give the actor a small uptick in the next few days. But that should not suffice to break the strong momentum of the PGMA campaign. That campaign, after all, enjoys a firm backbone in the clear superiority of the President’s campaign organization.
The K4 coalition has 100 percent candidate presence, which means it has a candidate running for every elective post there is in this general election. KNP has only a third of that. The other candidates have much lesser candidate presence.
Candidate presence will be crucial when the local campaigns sweep into action on March 25. At this second half of the campaign period, the bid for votes will be man-to-man, house-to-house. This is campaign in-depth and here the larger candidate-presence will be a major factor.
The next few weeks will show the two major campaigns in a severe test of staying power, courting the votes of micro-constituencies, small localities and all the organized groups. The two major presidential campaigns will go full throttle because every vote counts given the close positioning.
My own estimate is that the sea change has already happened. FPJ has climbed down from a high 39 percent to 30 percent share of voter preference. Like Roco’s, FPJ’s campaign may have peaked too early as well.