In a week in which the econ­o­my loomed large, and the par­ties ex­changed rhetor­i­cal fire over the Moody's cred­it rat­ings down­grade, an H.H.B & As­so­ciates poll for Guardian Me­dia Lim­it­ed has found that the ma­jor­i­ty of vot­ers in San Fer­nan­do West are gloomy to un­cer­tain about T&T's eco­nom­ic prospects.

The great­est share of peo­ple polled (46 per cent) felt that "the worst was yet to come," 30 per cent felt that "the worst was be­hind us" and 24 per cent were un­cer­tain.

Dur­ing a Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress Mon­day Night Fo­rum in Guaico, San­gre Grande, Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar was de­fi­ant in re­sponse to Moody's con­cerns about the Gov­ern­ment's per­sis­tent deficits, a find­ing seized on by Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment leader Dr Kei­th Row­ley, say­ing they would con­tin­ue their de­vel­op­ment plan.

Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Min­is­ter Vas­ant Bharath, mean­while, said: "This Gov­ern­ment han­dled (the econ­o­my) pru­dent­ly. It means that we have tak­en your ideas on board, we have lis­tened to you, un­der­stand­ing your needs and spend­ing ac­cord­ing to what your re­quire­ments are."

But the re­sults of the poll sug­gests the ma­jor­i­ty of con­stituents in San Fer­nan­do West (SFW) re­main un­com­fort­able about T&T eco­nom­ic fu­ture, es­pe­cial­ly with oil prices con­tin­u­ing to re­main at low lev­els.

As was the case in last week's poll in Tu­na­puna, vot­ers in SFW al­so show a lack of en­thu­si­asm for ei­ther leader of the two main po­lit­i­cal par­ties.

Per­sad-Bisses­sar and Row­ley were sta­tis­ti­cal­ly even (30 to 29 re­spec­tive­ly) when vot­ers were asked the ques­tion who is "ac­cept­able as prime min­is­ter," but when pushed on choos­ing a leader, asked who they con­sid­er "ac­cept­able with reser­va­tions," Row­ley pulled ahead by six per­cent­age points (30 to 24).

Jack Warn­er (60 per cent) and David Ab­du­lah (77 per cent) had high dis­ap­proval rat­ings but sur­pris­ing­ly 30 per cent chose Warn­er as "ac­cept­able with reser­va­tions."

In on job ap­proval, that is ap­proval of the per­for­mance of Per­sad-Bisses­sar as Prime Min­is­ter and Row­ley as Leader of the Op­po­si­tion, Row­ley (58 per cent) has moved ahead of Per­sad-Bisses­sar (49 per cent).

It was a sec­ond straight week of dis­mal job ap­proval and per­son­al ap­proval num­bers for the Prime Min­is­ter, with the San Fer­nan­do West find­ings mir­ror­ing those of Tu­na­puna.

300 polled

Poll­ster Louis Bertrand said of his method­ol­o­gy: "A strat­i­fied ran­dom sam­ple of 300 adults was se­lect­ed based on the polling di­vi­sions (PDs) in the con­stituen­cy. The PDs were strat­i­fied based on the size of the vic­to­ry of the win­ning par­ty."

Ques­tion­naires were ad­min­is­tered face-to-face by the in­ter­view­ers. The mar­gin of er­ror was 4.5 per cent.