SHAL­IZA HAS­SANALI

Vot­ers in the Tu­na­puna con­stituen­cy con­sid­er the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) the par­ty best ca­pa­ble of solv­ing their prob­lems, ac­cord­ing to a re­cent HHB and As­so­ciates Ltd poll led by poll­ster Louis Bertrand.

The poll, com­mis­sioned by Guardian Me­dia, is one of six mar­gin­al con­stituen­cies re­viewed by the firm lead­ing up to the Au­gust 10 Gen­er­al elec­tion.

In yes­ter­day’s T&T Guardian, the first seg­ment of the poll found that PNM Tu­na­puna can­di­date Es­mond Forde was ahead of UNC con­tender and for­mer pro­fes­sion­al foot­baller David Nakhid by a 16 per cent mar­gin in the tus­sle for the mar­gin­al seat. The poll’s mar­gin of er­ror is six per cent.

Tunapuna poll table 5

Face to face in­ter­views were con­duct­ed on 200 reg­is­tered vot­ers in the con­stituen­cy on is­sues-rang­ing from ma­jor is­sues in­flu­enc­ing the vote, par­ty best ca­pa­ble of solv­ing prob­lems, gen­er­al progress of coun­try and peo­ple, per­for­mance in the con­stituen­cy (PNM) and (UNC), as­sess­ment of can­di­dates, opin­ions of can­di­dates, rea­sons for the rat­ings, vot­ing in­ten­tions and vot­er switch­ing pat­terns.

Tu­na­puna, sit­u­at­ed along the east-west cor­ri­dor, is a mar­gin­al con­stituen­cy with 26,650 reg­is­tered vot­ers. The seat, which has been main­ly dom­i­nat­ed by the PNM over the years, has changed hands sev­er­al times.

Ex­am­in­ing the fi­nal part of the poll, re­spon­dents were asked to iden­ti­fy which par­ty they thought was best ca­pa­ble of solv­ing prob­lems.

“In this con­stituen­cy, the PNM is seen as the par­ty most ca­pa­ble of solv­ing vir­tu­al­ly all of the prob­lems,” the poll stat­ed.

PNM’s Tunapuna candidate Esmond Forde

Among some of the prob­lems iden­ti­fied were ed­u­ca­tion, hous­ing, util­i­ties, health care, re­open­ing of the econ­o­my, COVID-19 and youth train­ing and de­vel­op­ment, which scored rat­ings be­tween 35 to 52 per cent.

Re­spon­dents gave the UNC a 32 per cent rat­ing for “ed­u­ca­tion”, which was their high­est score among the en­tire list­ing.

Com­par­ing their lives now to five years ago, 27 per cent of vot­ers re­port­ed they were per­son­al­ly worse off, 38 per cent claimed their per­son­al sit­u­a­tion had not changed and 35 per cent stat­ed they are bet­ter off.

Re­gard­ing the per­for­mance in the con­stituen­cy, the PNM cap­tured a 41 per cent “good” rat­ing to the UNC’s 14 per cent. How­ev­er, 48 per cent of vot­ers rat­ed the UNC’s per­for­mance as “bad” com­pared to the PNM’s 33 per cent.

Among the ma­jor is­sues that were like­ly to in­flu­ence their votes, re­spon­dents iden­ti­fied health care (98 per cent), un­em­ploy­ment (96 per cent) and youth train­ing and de­vel­op­ment (96 per cent) as most im­por­tant.

The is­sues of il­le­gal Venezue­lan im­mi­grants (70 per cent), re­open­ing of the econ­o­my (68 per cent) and let­ting for­eign na­tion­als come home (59 per cent) were last on the list.

Tunapuna poll table 8

Poll’s method­ol­o­gy

A sam­ple of 200 reg­is­tered elec­tors were drawn from the con­stituen­cy. The polling di­vi­sions (PDs) were grouped by loy­al­ty to the UNC/PNM. Loy­al PDs were iden­ti­fied as those in which the win­ning par­ty had a dif­fer­ence from the los­er of 15 per cent or greater. All oth­er PDs were deemed to be “mar­gin­al.”

This al­lowed HHB and As­so­ciates to se­lect small­er sam­ples from “loy­al” polling di­vi­sions and larg­er sam­ples from “mar­gin­al” di­vi­sions.

The de­mo­graph­ic char­ac­ter­is­tics of the sam­ple with re­spect to age, gen­der, race and re­li­gion re­flect the poll­ster’s es­ti­mate of the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the con­stituen­cy as a whole.

Tunapuna poll table 6

UNC’s Tunapuna candidate David Nakhid