Labour Party’s presidential candidate, Peter Obi, has been named the most universally accepted candidate amongst the list of aspirants for the 2023 national presidential elections.
This is according to a recent poll by Stears, an African data and intelligence company.
According to the findings of the survey, Peter Obi is the only candidate amongst the lot to achieve at least 25% of the vote in most geopolitical regions, that is five out of six, based on the responses of the voters that declared their candidate preference.
Recall that one of the conditions to win the Nigerian presidential elections is that the candidate must secure at least 25% of the vote in at least two-thirds of the states. This condition is to ensure some level of universal popularity in the country.
Furthermore, the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) followed with four out of five, while Atiku Abubakar of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) secured 25% of the vote in only two geopolitical zones.
Notably, the result of the poll revealed that Peter Obi only failed to secure 25% of the vote preference in the North-West region, due to the relatively strong presence of Rabiu KwanKwaso of the NNPP and Bola Tinubu of APC.
Specifically, in Kano State, which is a stronghold for Rabiu Kwankwaso, 20% of the interviewed voters opted to vote for the NNPP, while APC followed closely with 17%. On the other hand, 40% of the voters were silent, indicating that the results could still swing in the favour of any of the aspirants.
Results show varying possibilities: According to the findings of the poll, Peter Obi appears to be the favourite based on declared votes, with 27% of the voters interviewed indicating their support for Peter Obi, while Tinubu followed at a distance with 15%.
- Atiku Abubakar recorded 12% votes. Meanwhile, there were 37% of the voters did not indicate their preferred candidate, hereby affecting the possible outcome of the coming election.
- Hence, the predictive model shows that Peter Obi is likely to win with a 41% proportion of the vote if there is a high turnout in the election, followed by Tinubu and Atiku with 31% and 20% votes respectively.
- Meanwhile, in a scenario where there is low voter turnout, Bola Tinubu is predicted to win the election with a percentage of 39%, followed by Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar with 32% and 22% respectively.
Obi takes a comfortable lead: Meanwhile, having predicted the possible choices of the silent voters, Peter Obi still maintains the lead in the race for the presidential seat.
“Even after including silent voters, Peter Obi holds a comfortable lead. In essence, the Stears electoral poll and prediction model affirms that Peter Obi is by far the most popular and desired candidate for the 2023 Presidential Elections,” the report reads.
About the poll and model: The Stears election prediction model is a probit regression model. A probit model calculates the probability that an observation (voter) will fall into a binary category (vote or no vote).
- The Stears election prediction model estimates the likelihood that each silent voter will vote for each of the top three candidates: Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Peter Obi, and Atiku Abubakar.
- The Stears 2023 Electoral Poll covers 6,220 respondents in total across Nigeria’s 36 states, making it the largest telephone-based electoral poll in Nigeria.
- Furthermore, the poll includes booster samples from strategic states to enable more precise national and state-level predictions.
- The poll included 22 questions (on demographics, voting history, top-of-mind-issues, religion, ethnicity, confidence in INEC etc.), with an average time of 15 minutes per interview, and was conducted in five major languages: Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Pidgin English and English.
