Wonky poll confirms what we all suspect
As the year drags on and we wait for hard evidence that the fight against state capture and corruption has found real traction, the real news has an ephemeral quality to it.
Earlier this week former US president Barack Obama came to Johannesburg to mark Nelson Mandela’s centenary.
He was brilliant and witty and clever, and then he was gone again. Leaving us to each other. Not only that. We haven’t even reached the bleakest part of winter yet. For me, that’s August. Fortunately Ipsos, a market research company, has just published a wonderfully wobbly opinion poll that is getting our political parties hot under their collars.
It says its polling in May and June found ANC support at 60%, the DA at 13% and the EFF at 7%.
For the DA that number looks impossibly low and a number of DA leaders and analysts have scorned it.
The person whose views I trust most in these matters is a guy called Dawie Scholtz, an independent analyst who often gets it right.
Scholtz says on Twitter the DA numbers are “extremely suspicious” and then partly explains why.
Of the people who told Ipsos they were “undecided” 23% were white, 50% were Indian and 40% coloured.
Just 15% were black. Scholtz reckons those undecided or unallocated voters were disproportionately former DA voters. They may drift back to the DA in the end.
The EFF “vote” in the poll, Scholtz says, indicates the party is holding its ground, but EFF leaders, too, will take comfort from his wider view of the Ipsos poll, which is that it vastly underestimates the votes of all parties and should be treated with utmost caution. Okay, but still. Broadly, the poll confirms what we all suspect. We suspect the DA is going to slip from the 22% of the national vote it won in 2014. Its internal squabbling must carry a price, though it still has about eight months before the election. My opinion is that it will hold around 20%.
We suspect the EFF will grow its support, but Ipsos gives it just 7%, not even a percentage point more than the 6.35% it won in 2014.
That just has to be wrong, even though the EFF is struggling to find traction now that Jacob Zuma has been removed as head of state.
Its strident approach to land reform and attacks on racial groups alienate voters. To merely double its vote from 2014 the EFF has to find another one million voters.
I doubt they’re there. I reckon just inside 10%.
The ANC’s 60% is remarkable. I suspect the bigger the party the more accurate the Ipsos poll might tend to be. Partly, the number must reflect public relief that Zuma has gone, even though he continues to politick within the party.
But 60%? Really?
I asked Scholtz on Twitter, “so whatever happens to the DA and the EFF, the ANC is probably home and dry ... [for the 2019 election]?”
His answer was emphatic: “Yes,” he said, “absolutely”.
That explains a lot. If President Cyril Ramaphosa already knows he is going to win the election by what looks like a pretty wide margin, there’s no reason for him to tear into every demon in front of him.
Even the embarrassment of rushing off to reassure the Zulu monarch on land expropriation may not hurt him for long.
In fact, Scholtz reckons, Ramaphosa got the king thing just right. “It’s pretty clear,” he tweeted the other day, “that Ramaphosa’s politics are ruthlessly and consistently electoral. He’s been on every side of the ideological spectrum.... There’s one common denominator: he picks the optimal electoral position every time.”
On expropriation without compensation, letting public consultation run nice and early crowds out a lot of the radical economic transformation talk in his own party and pushes the EFF further left, where there are fewer votes. We are a conservative nation. But hard to predict nonetheless.
Logic suggests that should Ramaphosa win an emphatic victory in 2019 he would get a second term as ANC leader in 2022 and leader of the country in 2024. But that’s just logic and there is so much intrigue inside the ANC it is difficult to know what’s going on.
There is, for instance, someone constantly briefing journalists anonymously that Ramaphosa is about to be called before a special national general council of the ANC and removed. It is fun to watch the threat doing the rounds of the various newspaper groups.
The president’s best defence against this is his muchmocked party unity line. Political leaders everywhere do it. Theresa May, in much more trouble than Ramaphosa, is doing it in the UK. In China, Xi Jinping just made it the law.
Better than party unity, however, would be a growing perception among ANC leaders and activists that Ramaphosa is a winner for them. Polls like the one Ipsos has just produced, however wonky, will do him no harm at all.