As political office aspirants and party members prepare for the official commencement of political campaigns on 28 September 2022, we look forward to the campaign promises of the various political aspirants. Although, it is expected that new voters’ registration should, to an extent, influence the outcome of the 2023 presidential election, we believe a lot depends on the demography of the newly registered voters.
Meanwhile, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has disclosed that it found 1,126,359 records out of the 2,523,458 new registrations between June 28, 2021, and January 14, 2022, invalid and consequently delisted them.
A look at the 2015 and 2019 presidential elections reveals some interesting patterns that may to an extent define the performance of each of the presidential candidates in 2023. For instance, looking at the 2015 versus 2019 presidential election results, although, the All Progressive Congress (APC) won in the North-West in 2019, it lost grounds by polling 5.99m votes in 2019 compared to 7.12m votes in 2015.
On the other hand, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) gained grounds in the North-west, polling a total of 2.28m votes in 2019 compared with 1.14m in 2015. In the North-east, while the APC also won with 3.24m votes in 2019 compared to 2.85m votes in 2015, the PDP made appreciable inroads by polling a total of 1.26m in 2019 compared to 0.79m in 2015. In the North central, the APC polled a total vote of 2.31m, 2% higher than 2.26m votes recorded in 2015 while the PDP polled 1.76m votes, 15% higher than 1.53m votes recorded in 2015.
Noting that Atiku Abubakar was the presidential candidate of the PDP in 2019 and still retains the party’s ticket for the 2023 presidential election, it can be assumed that he will, at the minimum, retain his 2019 support base of 5.3m votes in the northern region (North-west, North-East, and North-Central). This is particularly so, given that there is currently no other northern presidential candidate in a region where ethnic and religious sentiments remain critical determinants of voting patterns.
Though we expect APC’s Bola Ahmed Tinubu to get reasonable support from the North, considering many northern governors have pledged their support to him, we believe the support base of the APC will shrink significantly compared to 2015 and 2019, given that Bola Ahmed Tinubu is not a northerner and the power of incumbency the party should have has waned significantly, given the deteriorating economic and security conditions.
In the South-South, the PDP’s support base shrank, as the total votes in the 2019 presidential election declined to 2.23m from 4.71m in 2015 just as it reduced in the South-East to 1.69m in 2019 from 2.46m in 2015. On the other hand, the All Progressive Congress’ support base increased in the South-South to 1.05m from 0.418m in 2015 just as it increased to 0.403m in 2019 from 0.198m in 2015 in the South-East. South-West was mixed for PDP and APC.
The best evidence for voter preferences comes from state governorship elections, but there have
been just two governorship elections recently, in Ekiti and Osun states (both in the SouthWest), and these were split between the PDP and the APC, respectively. We expect to get better feelers of voter preferences as the campaigns become more vibrant.
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