SHAL­IZA HAS­SANALI

The Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) is slight­ly ahead of the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) in a na­tion­al poll on the Au­gust 10 gen­er­al elec­tions con­duct­ed by HHB and As­so­ciates Lim­it­ed for Guardian Me­dia.

The poll shows that 35 per cent of re­spon­dents sup­port the PNM and 29 per cent sup­port the UNC, while on­ly two per cent said they would vote for oth­er par­ties. How­ev­er, with two weeks to go be­fore vot­ers cast their bal­lots, 16 per cent they are still un­de­cid­ed and 11 per cent in­di­cat­ed they would not vote.

Man­ag­ing Di­rec­tor of HHB and As­so­ciates Louis Bertrand said new po­lit­i­cal par­ties have not in­flu­enced the vot­ing pop­u­la­tion.

“None...not a sin­gle one of them. So third force, yes, but the third force is not there as yet. We have to deal with what we have,” he said.

He said two im­por­tant caveats must be ap­plied in con­sid­er­ing the poll find­ings: “In the first place the dif­fer­ence in per­cent­ages for the PNM and UNC are on­ly mar­gin­al­ly sig­nif­i­cant­ly dif­fer­ent when ad­just­ed for the er­ror of the es­ti­mates of the poll (four per cent.) Sec­ond­ly, in the first past the post sys­tem,

over­all votes (as de­rived from a na­tion­al poll) tell very lit­tle or about the po­ten­tial win­ner. A par­ty has to win a ma­jor­i­ty of con­stituen­cies in or­der to win the elec­tions.”

He added: “This is a na­tion­al poll. This does not in­di­cate who is like­ly to win.”

The poll found that vot­ing will be heav­i­ly in­flu­enced by race, with 61 per cent of vot­ers of African de­scent re­port­ing that they will vote for the PNM, while six per cent are sup­port­ing the UNC.

“Sim­i­lar­ly, 55 per cent of In­dos will vote for the UNC, on­ly sev­en per cent will vote for the PNM. It seems from the poll that the PNM has a sig­nif­i­cant per­cent­age of the vote of those of oth­er races—44 per cent—com­pared with 19 per cent for the UNC,” the poll stat­ed.

Re­spon­dents were al­so asked whether they have “def­i­nite­ly de­cid­ed to vote for your se­lect­ed par­ty or is there a chance you might change your mind?” Based on their re­spons­es, 77 per cent of those who in­tend to vote have de­cid­ed which par­ty they will vote for, ten per cent don’t know and 13 per cent might change their minds.

At least 40 per cent of re­spon­dents said they did not care much about who wins the elec­tions. In re­sponse to that poll ques­tion, 22 per cent said “not very much” and 18 per cent “not at all”, while 59 per cent cared “a great deal” or “a fair amount.” On­ly one per cent said they “don’t know.”

Bro­ken down by age, just un­der half—45 per cent to 48 per cent in the 18 to 44 age group—said they do not care who wins.

“This drops to be­tween 29 per cent to 36 per cent for those in the 45-plus age brack­ets,” the poll stat­ed.

“Mo­ti­vat­ing young peo­ple to get in­volved in the elec­toral process has been known to be dif­fi­cult for some time now, but the lack of in­ter­est seems to be spread­ing up to age 44.”

Bertrand said this is very wor­ry­ing to him as a cit­i­zen.

“What is sur­pris­ing is that young goes up to the age of 44. There is quite a sub­stan­tial amount of peo­ple be­tween ages 30 and 34 who are not in­ter­est­ed. It is known that young peo­ple tend not to be in­ter­est­ed. What is sur­pris­ing is that peo­ple are be­com­ing less and less in­ter­est­ed even though it is peo­ple who are old­er. So there is a sense of dis­il­lu­sion­ment in the coun­try with the whole po­lit­i­cal process,” he said.

It is very wide­spread and it go­ing up the age brack­ets. The dis­il­lu­sion­ment speaks about the two main po­lit­i­cal par­ties.”

On the is­sue of how the coun­try has fared over the last five years, the poll showed that al­most half of the re­spon­dents—47 per cent—felt T&T had fared worse and 28 per cent felt it re­mained the same. Just un­der 24 per cent thought the coun­try fared bet­ter and one per cent of vot­ers were not sure.

“With re­spect to per­son­al for­tunes, al­most one third (30 per cent) re­port­ed that they were per­son­al­ly worse off now than five years ago and al­most half (43 per cent) claimed their per­son­al sit­u­a­tion had not changed,” the poll re­port­ed.

On­ly 27 per cent felt they had done bet­ter.

A two-stage sam­pling pro­ce­dure was used for the poll. In the first stage, a sam­pling of con­stituen­cies was se­lect­ed with the prob­a­bil­i­ty of se­lec­tion be­ing pro­por­tion­al to the num­ber of reg­is­tered elec­tors in each con­stituen­cy. This was based on the cur­rent Elec­tions and Bound­aries Com­mis­sion (EBC) da­ta.

In the sec­ond stage, polling di­vi­sions in each of the se­lect­ed con­stituen­cies were se­lect­ed based on the size of vic­to­ry of the win­ning par­ty. A sam­ple of 600 adults who were reg­is­tered to vote was se­lect­ed.

Ques­tion­naires were ad­min­is­tered face-to-face by in­ter­view­ers to house­holds in the se­lect­ed polling di­vi­sions.

Re­spon­dents were asked about their in­ter­est in the elec­tions, the ma­jor is­sues in­flu­enc­ing their votes, the par­ty most ca­pa­ble of solv­ing prob­lems, the gen­er­al progress of the coun­try and peo­ple, per­for­mance in run­ning the coun­try, the favoura­bil­i­ty rat­ings of key po­lit­i­cal lead­ers, com­par­a­tive rat­ings of the PNM and UNC lead­ers as prime min­is­ter, par­ty im­age and vot­ing in­ten­tions.