It is as clear as day that the To­ba­go Peo­ple’s Par­ty (TPP), which emerged form the Pro­gres­sive De­mo­c­ra­t­ic Pa­tri­ots (PDP), has been gift­ed an­oth­er rich de­posit in their po­lit­i­cal ac­count. They were gift­ed a mod­er­ate but in­dica­tive first de­posit in Jan­u­ary 2021 when the elec­torate tied the PDP up with the PNM 6-6. Then that de­posit in­creased phe­nom­e­nal­ly to 14-1 a year lat­er in De­cem­ber 2021 af­ter the num­ber of elec­toral dis­tricts moved tie-break­ing­ly to 15. It was in­du­bitably a rich de­posit; the elec­torate had added eight more seats to the pre­vi­ous six, mov­ing de­posits from the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment in the process. And now, in Jan­u­ary 2026, the TPP was gift­ed with the last re­main­ing de­posit.

It’s now 15-zip, folks. There’s nowhere else to go. It’s as if the elec­torate were say­ing that they had re­moved every hin­drance and im­ped­i­ment from the TPP, and the lat­ter could now go and gov­ern. As if.

The bare facts of the lat­est elec­tion are pro­vi­sion­al­ly as fol­lows. The elec­torate con­sist­ed of 53,239 vot­ers across 15 elec­toral dis­tricts. The vot­er turnout was ap­prox­i­mate­ly 50.69 per cent. The dis­tri­b­u­tion of votes re­ceived by the po­lit­i­cal par­ties is as fol­lows: In­no­v­a­tive De­mo­c­ra­t­ic Al­liance (IDA) – 181; PNM – 10,456; TPP – 16,240; and Uni­ty of the Peo­ple (UTP) – 8. The to­tal valid votes were 26,885, and the to­tal re­ject­ed bal­lots were 104.

In the De­cem­ber 2021 elec­tions, the elec­torate num­bered 51,383; the to­tal num­ber of bal­lots cast, or the vot­er turnout, was 29,273 (or 56.97 per cent); and the num­ber of valid votes cast was 29,175. The PDP won the elec­tion with 16,932 votes (or 58.04 per cent); the PNM fol­lowed with 11,941 votes (or 40.93 per cent); and the oth­er three par­ties re­ceived a com­bined to­tal of 302 votes (1.03 per cent). The PDP beat the PNM by 4991 votes.

It is im­por­tant to high­light the vot­er turnout over the years since com­men­ta­tors tend to link the per­for­mance of a par­ty in an elec­tion to how many peo­ple turn out, and to link the lat­ter to par­tic­u­lar is­sues aris­ing in a cam­paign, es­pe­cial­ly the price of oil and gas, al­leged cor­rup­tion, and con­stituen­cy ne­glect. Let’s look at vot­er turnout fig­ures from 1980 (when the As­sem­bly was re-in­au­gu­rat­ed and Robin­son was in charge) to 2025/2026.

We will pro­ceed by iden­ti­fy­ing the elec­tion year and then plac­ing the size of the vot­er turnout in brack­ets. 1980 (66.24); 1984 (70.11); 1988 (53.55); 1992 (56.69); 1996 (43.90); 2001 (60.13); 2005 (54.43); 2009 (56.39); 2013 (70.08); 2017 (49.78); Jan­u­ary 2021 (51.85); Dec 2021 (56.97); Jan­u­ary 2026 (50.69).

I in­vite read­ers, es­pe­cial­ly stu­dents of pol­i­tics, to match these fig­ures with par­ty for­tune or fail­ure at the polls and, sub­se­quent­ly, with de­vel­op­ment or lack there­of in the gov­er­nance of the is­land. In par­tic­u­lar, they might wish to match them with the dif­fer­ent Chair­men/Chief Sec­re­taries who were in charge.

In the mean­time, I am more in­ter­est­ed in why so many peo­ple have been stay­ing away from the polls. If we use a ceil­ing of 55 per cent for vot­er turnout in the da­ta above, we find that in ful­ly six elec­tions—1988, 1996, 2005, 2017, Jan 2021, and Jan­u­ary 2026—more than half of the elec­torate stayed away.

Sup­pose half of that num­ber were to start from the next elec­tion to join the faith­ful in turn­ing up, how would the gov­er­nance pic­ture be af­fect­ed?

Of an elec­torate of 53,239, around 26,885 vot­ed, and of those 26,885, on­ly 16,240 vot­ed for TPP; but TPP won. So Far­ley and his ex­ec­u­tive will be gov­ern­ing with the back­ing of a rel­a­tive­ly small num­ber of the elec­torate.

He has an abun­dance of rich­es, but he will have to clev­er­ly man­age the 70 per cent of the peo­ple who will ei­ther stand against him or pop­u­late the side­lines wait­ing for him to de­liv­er mag­ic. He has al­ready be­gun to show how he will gov­ern. Every elect­ed As­sem­bly­man has been giv­en a job in the ex­ec­u­tive. So if he in­tends to cre­ate over­sight com­mit­tees in the usu­al way, he must tell us where he is go­ing to get them from—es­pe­cial­ly in the ab­sence of an op­po­si­tion.

Dr Win­ford James is a re­tired UWI lec­tur­er who has been analysing is­sues in ed­u­ca­tion, lan­guage, de­vel­op­ment, and pol­i­tics in Trinidad and To­ba­go and the wider Caribbean on ra­dio and TV since the 1970s. He has al­so writ­ten thou­sands of columns for all the ma­jor news­pa­pers in the coun­try. He can be reached at jay­win­ster@gmail.com.