SHAR­LENE RAM­PER­SAD

shar­lene.ram­per­sad@guardian.co.tt

Po­lit­i­cal an­a­lyst Dr Win­ford James be­lieves vot­ing based along racial lines boils down to sev­er­al ba­sic fac­tors, the ma­jor one be­ing that peo­ple trust politi­cians who are the same race as theirs.

James was com­ment­ing on the re­sults of Guardian Me­dia-com­mis­sioned poll done by Louis Bertrand’s H.H.B. & As­so­ciates. The first part of the poll was pub­lished yes­ter­day and showed the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) hav­ing a slight over­all edge over the Op­po­si­tion Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress. The rest of the poll will be car­ried to­mor­row and Wednes­day.

James said ta­ble 10, which asked who is the bet­ter choice for Prime Min­is­ter which showed PNM leader Dr Kei­th Row­ley slight­ly ahead of UNC leader Per­sad-Bisses­sar, showed the strength that eth­nic­i­ty holds in vot­ing. The an­swers giv­en by the re­spon­dents were not­ed by their eth­nic­i­ty.

“Peo­ple trust peo­ple who look like them, who are so­cial­ly con­struct­ed like them, peo­ple look at those peo­ple are more trust­wor­thy, and it speaks to eth­nic com­pe­ti­tion, world­wide, as to which eth­nic­i­ty should pre­vail,” James said.

“So de­mo­graph­ics are im­por­tant, the per­cent­age of each eth­nic group in the pop­u­la­tion is im­por­tant, for the rea­son I am try­ing to ex­plain here, peo­ple, in gen­er­al, do not rise above their eth­nic­i­ty be­cause dis­trust is there.”

James said he be­lieves these is­sues will take a lot of time to over­come.

“Even­tu­al­ly, we will have to re­ly on ed­u­ca­tion and clear even-hand­ed­ness in the way the re­sources of the coun­try are dis­trib­uted—some peo­ple are us­ing that by the way but that is a small num­ber. Some peo­ple, de­spite their ed­u­ca­tion, will fall back on the com­fort of eth­nic vot­ing, be­cause it is a com­fort­able thing, it is more com­fort­ing to vote their own than to vote the oth­er group.”

He said this type of vot­ing is fur­ther fu­elled be­cause of where the dif­fer­ent eth­nic groups live.

“We don’t live in the same places, so we don’t so­cialise in the same places—maybe on a na­tion­al lev­el in cer­tain places, like in the pub­lic ser­vice there is some so­cial­i­sa­tion, some in schools but when we go back home in the evening af­ter work, we are go­ing to so­cialise in re­la­tion to our eth­nic­i­ty most­ly and that is why have some what you call safe seats.”

James said this type of vot­ing will con­tin­ue un­til there is an ed­u­ca­tion-dri­ven per­son­al and so­cial con­scious­ness that makes peo­ple re­ject vot­ing based on race. He said if gov­ern­ments are more trans­par­ent in their spend­ing and the pop­u­la­tion can see that one eth­nic group was not favoured over an­oth­er, that may al­so help to es­tab­lish a move away from race-based vot­ing.

Po­lit­i­cal sci­en­tist Dr Bish­nu Ra­goonath was of the view that the poll re­sult still was not a clear re­flec­tion of who will win the elec­tion.

“The poll is a na­tion­al poll and doesn’t tell us who is go­ing to win the elec­tion. It tells us where peo­ple are and how many are sat­is­fied. It gives an idea of the lev­els of dis­sat­is­fac­tion and progress made since the last elec­tion. It tells us things we know al­ready,” Ra­goonath said.

Asked whether there were any ar­eas of con­cern to him, Ra­goonath said, “No, I don’t think any­thing...It’s a na­tion­al poll. It’s across the coun­try and as far as we are con­cerned, it tells us noth­ing about vot­ing be­hav­iour in the mar­gin­al con­stituen­cy and that’s where the vic­to­ries will be made. I don’t know, based on this poll, how Moru­ga Table­land will vote.”

He said polling the mar­gin­als would give an idea about who will se­cure vic­to­ry on Au­gust 10 but was not sur­prised by the poll find­ings that peo­ple will still vote based on race. Po­lit­i­cal an­a­lyst Dr Hamid Ghany mean­while said giv­en the poll’s four per cent mar­gin of er­ror, the UNC had done much bet­ter than ex­pect­ed.

“The fact that when the favoura­bil­i­ty rat­ings of both lead­ers are jux­ta­posed against each oth­er, the fact that Row­ley earns 57 per cent and Per­sad-Bisses­sar earns 53 per cent means that the dif­fer­ence is neg­li­gi­ble giv­en the fact that the poll has a mar­gin of er­ror of +/- 4 per cent. This is ei­ther a sta­tis­ti­cal dead-heat or a slight Row­ley ad­van­tage,” Ghany said.

Ghany said the re­spons­es to the ques­tion of who would be a bet­ter Prime Min­is­ter al­so showed an­oth­er dead-heat or slight ad­van­tage to Row­ley.

“This would sug­gest that both par­ties will have to fine-tune their po­lit­i­cal ma­chin­ery in the fi­nal two weeks of the cam­paign, as there is no walkover by ei­ther side be­ing con­tem­plat­ed from the re­spons­es to Ques­tions 8 and 9. In the ab­sence of any con­stituen­cy da­ta, the par­ties will have no idea where they will need to go based on this poll.”

Speak­ing on the re­sults of Ques­tion 10, Ghany said while Row­ley holds an ad­van­tage over Per­sad-Bisses­sar based on the re­spons­es of the ‘Oth­er/Mixed’ group, he be­lieves the group who did not an­swer maybe this elec­tion’s de­cid­ing fac­tor.

“The most sig­nif­i­cant sta­tis­tic here is the non-re­sponse among 13.4 per cent Afro-Trinida­di­ans and 15.5 per cent In­do-Trinida­di­ans. How they will vote on elec­tion day could tilt this elec­tion one way or the oth­er,” Ghany said.