Survey snapshots

Surveys: Can’t stand them, can’t live without them, at least among people who give a fig about such things—and in a country as steeped in politics as the Philippines, who isn’t? One moment the latest survey is celebrated as a validation of a candidate’s increasing stock among the electorate, and the next—when it delivers contrary results—it’s decried as part of an insidious plot to manipulate voters and lead them, Pied-Piper-like, to the fold of the candidate with the big money to have bankrolled the poll.

How should one react to the surveys coming out at this point in the game, when the situation remains in heavy flux with one contender’s candidacy in limbo and another facing his own disqualification cases? Perhaps the right attitude for now is to chill, to remember that surveys are but a snapshot of voter preferences at a given time—neither definitive nor useless, but a guidepost one could use to plot future action.

Ex-senator and former presidential aspirant Manny Villar should know: Six years ago, at the start of 2009, practically all the surveys showed him to be the frontrunner, on track to become the next president of the Philippines. He had glad-handed early, invested in the slickest ads, and prepared the groundwork for his run with as much precision, efficiency and clout as his multibillion-peso campaign could muster. And all that meticulous planning was showing in the regular polls that indicated he had become top of mind among the electorate.

Who knew that in August of that year, former president Corazon Aquino would pass on, and her only son Benigno Aquino III—until then a fair to middling senator uninterested in the presidency—would become a serious contender overnight on the wave of enormous public sympathy? On Sept. 9, 2009, 40 days after his mother’s death, Aquino III announced his candidacy; the terrain had shifted, and the campaign was now Villar’s to lose—which he did, eventually. Even the most forward-looking survey failed to anticipate that dramatic turn of events.

It’s still a long five months until Election Day, and any candidate relying on surveys would be a fool to count chickens before they’re hatched. A clichÈ—but consider Davao Mayor Rodrigo Duterte who ended up with egg on his face after announcing he would not debate with his fellow candidate Mar Roxas because, according to the latest survey at that time, he was on top and the latter was warming fourth place. Per Duterte, Roxas should first improve his rankings before mustering the temerity to ask to share center stage with the then frontrunner.

Unmentioned by Duterte was the fact that the Social Weather Stations survey that had him in the lead was commissioned by his camp, or at least a known supporter of his. Observers also noted that the question asked of respondents seemed skewed in favor of Duterte because it mentioned his name but not those of the other declared candidates. (SWS dismissed this as a flawed argument.) Nevertheless, the survey result was immediately seized upon by Duterte supporters as game-changing evidence that their candidate was virtually unstoppable.

The prematureness of that belief is now evident, with two new surveys indicating that the earlier Duterte-favoring poll must have been, at the very least, an outlier: Both SWS and Pulse Asia have come out with more recent data showing that it’s Sen. Grace Poe and Vice President Jejomar Binay clawing it out atop the race, with Roxas and Duterte alternating in third and fourth places, and Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago last. With Roxas even ahead of him, Duterte’s camp has uncharacteristically gone mute on the issue of debating with a supposed cellar-dweller; Poe and Binay, meanwhile, have tried to strike the right tone between jubilant and cautious in the wake of these latest polls, saying only that the results tell them they have more work to do to gain the trust of the electorate.

Yes—and they can use the surveys to do that, by gauging the issues and concerns that resonate most urgently with the public, the fears and expectations of a country that increasingly sees the coming elections as a critical turning point: Will the Philippines finally break free of its ramshackle conditions and become a more open, transparent, functioning democracy in the near future, or will it remain tethered to its feudal, dysfunctional present?

The surveys don’t provide the final answer. They should, instead, lead to the right questions.