Crunching out poll numbers

Any election is a numbers game. Decisions on whether to repeatedly stump a province, which station to place political ads, and what campaign line to use are all aimed at vote margins. Polls pinpoint where candidates numerically stand at certain stages of the campaign. A third of party funds are reserved for the canvassing to protect – or manufacture – leads.

Numbers are behind the incessant efforts to unite the opposition’s Fernando Poe Jr. and Panfilo Lacson. For all the Poe camp’s forecasts of a landslide, the fact remains that he is only neck-to-neck with Gloria Arroyo in the surveys. A breakaway can come not through petitions – seven so far, and still counting – to disqualify her, but from Lacson’s withdrawal from the presidential race.

Number crunchers in Poe’s Koalisyon ng Nagkakaisang Pilipino are gunning for a five-million margin of victory. With that, they believe they can thwart any attempt by the administration party to massage the results through dagdag-bawas (vote padding-shaving). They’re far from it, however. Poe, like Ms Arroyo, is presently hovering in surveys at 30 percent. With 80 percent of voters usually turning out on election day, or 32 million of 2004’s 40 million registered voters, the 30 percent translates to 9.6 million.

Lacson, meanwhile, is rating at 12 percent. That’s 3.84 million votes, close enough to the KNP’s targetted five-million margin – if Lacson agrees to swing his votes in Poe’s favor. The balance can come from the seven percent, or 2.8 million, who will decide whom to vote only in the last two weeks of the campaign.

Whether Lacson will withdraw will depend on the numbers, too. He does not believe in surveys. Misreading the polls before the 2001 elections, he said he made it to the 13 Senate slots despite ratings that he was only No. 15-17. He believes instead in feng shui, that 2004 is his year. He thus says it’s Poe who should slide down to vice president and handily beat Noli de Castro, while he takes on Arroyo head-on. Given her present 30-percent rating versus Lacson’s 12, Arroyo’s strategists are snickering at the prospect of an Arroyo-Lacson square off. "That makes the job a lot easier for us," one of her campaign spokesmen glows.

Still, Poe’s backers are not giving up on Lacson. The line they are using to convince Lacson to withdraw is the lesson from the 1992 election. They say that had opposition candidates Danding Cojuangco and Ramon Mitra Jr. joined forces then, their combined votes of 4.1 million and 3.3 million, respectively, easily could have trounced Fidel Ramos’s 5.34-million victory. Even if only Imelda Marcos had swung her 2.34 million votes for either of them, Ramos would not have made it.

Assuming Lacson withdraws, will his voters swing to Poe for a runaway win? Surveys don’t show it. On the contrary, close to half of his 12 percent would likely go to Arroyo. The Lacson vote is not an anti-administration vote after all. It is largely a middle-class base of voters who pine for police reforms and get-tough stance on crime. They are not ones to be enamored by movie celebrity. Without Lacson as a choice, they would go for someone with experience in fighting narcotraders and kidnappers. That’s Arroyo. The other half of Lacson’s voters could swing to Raul Roco and Eddie Villanueva as well. To tip the numbers, a withdrawn Lacson would have to continue campaigning – for Poe.

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