Holness drove JLP vote; loyalty to party accounted for majority of PNP ballots
THE findings of Bill Johnson’s August poll held true in the September 3 General Election as most Labourites voted for the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) because they wanted Andrew Holness to continue as prime minister, while seeing the People’s National Party (PNP) return to power was the reason that the majority of Comrades gave for casting their ballots.
Johnson and his team of researchers, who had successfully predicted the outcome of the election in their August poll, were commissioned by the Jamaica Observer to return to the field a week after the JLP pulverised the PNP 49-14 seats for a second consecutive term as Government.
The post-election poll, conducted September 11-13 among 1,000 voting-age Jamaicans islandwide, has a sampling error of plus or minus three per cent.
When the pollsters asked people to say whether they voted in the election and for which party they had cast their ballot, 33 per cent of respondents said they did exercise their franchise. Of that number, 55 per cent said they voted for the JLP candidate, while 41 per cent said they voted for the PNP candidate.
“Forty-four per cent of those who voted for the JLP said the main reason they voted for it was because they wanted Andrew Holness to continue as prime minister,” said Johnson. “This compares to only two per cent of PNP voters who voted for the PNP because they wanted Peter Phillips to become prime minister.”
The poll, Johnson said, also found that one-third of JLP voters voted for that party because they wanted the JLP to continue to govern the country, compared to three-quarters of those who voted for the PNP because they wanted it to govern the country.
“Twenty-two per cent of JLP supporters and 18 per cent of those who voted for the PNP voted the way they did because of the person who would be their member of parliament. These results are remarkably similar to those from our pre-election poll which was conducted August 21 to 23, less than two weeks before the election,” Johnson noted.
In that survey, 48 per cent of JLP supporters said they would vote for the party to ensure that Holness remained prime minister, while 11 per cent of PNP supporters indicated that they would vote for that party because they wanted Peter Phillips to become prime minister.
At the same time, more PNP supporters (76 per cent) said their vote would be driven by their loyalty to the party, while for the JLP the loyalty factor accounted for 42 per cent of its supporters.