” Has VP Robredo been the victim of a one-two boxing-style combination? “
The results of the first 2022 voter-preference survey – 55 percent of voters preferred former Senator Ferdinand marcos Jr. and 23 percent preferred Vice President Leni RObredo, with the three other major presidential candidates faring worse than the VP – came as a great shock to the supporters of the nation’s second-highest official.
How, Ms. Robredo’s supporters asked, could the voter preference of the son and namesake be so high, and how could that of the VP be so low, when (1) there was a huge body of voters who chose her in the 2016 vice presidential race against Marcos, (2) she has a far better public-service record than he does, (3) the dictator’s son was facing numerous disqualification cases and (4) he is a member of the most reviled First Family in the history of this country?
The voter preference survey firms stoutly insisted that their methodologies were good and that they had done a good job of survey-sample preparation. They were impervious to any suggestions regarding the representativeness of their 2,400-respondent sample. All of the Philippine electorate’s major segments were adequately represented in the survey samples, they insisted.
Naturally, either one of two things could happen to the voter-preference survey findings. Either they would be validated by the actual election results – and the survey firms would look great – or the very high Marcos figures and the very low Robredo figures would end up being way off the mark and the polling firms would end up with eggs on their faces.
Clearly, the firms’ reputations were on the line; if the May 9 results were far from their Marcos 55-Robredo 23 prognostication, their professional credibility would take a big hit.
But a corresponding risk was involved for the voter-preference survey firms. If the actual number of votes cast for Ferdinand marcos Jr. and Vice President Robredo hewed close to the unprecedentedly high forecast for the former and the abnormally low figure for the latter, would the suspicion not arise that there was a connection between the voter preference survey numbers and the number of votes cast for those two candidates on May 9? Might it not occur to some logically minded people that there was an unholy alliance between personnel of the polling firms and the Commission on Elections, to the end that the nation would be led to believe that the polling firms were right after all?
In fact, this thought has occurred to many people, even people who are not Kakampink. After all, there is an uncanny, close correspondence between the 55-percent voter preference reported by the polling forms and the commanding lead established by Marcos as soon as the votes started to be counted.
Has VP Robredo been the victim of a one-two boxing-style combination involving the polling firms’ pre-election mind conditioning and the Comelec’s mischief? That is the big question on the minds of anti-Marcos voters. Many circumstances point to an affirmative answer.
