EVIDENCE OF SWING IN EARLY PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION RESULTS: What matters in analysing early election results is SWING – the percentage of the votes which swing away from one party to another. Therefore the high PF results on the Copperbelt – of around 70% - do not mean much since PF got an average of 68% on the Copperbelt in 2011. The real swing on the Copperbelt is from MMD (26% in 2011) towards UPND (currently running at about 20% in early results, whereas the got only 4% in 2011). What is happening is that former MMD votes are now going to UPND, but this is no advantage to UPND since they have to take votes off PF, which they are not doing. Compare this with the early result from Mkaika in Eastern Province which voted 52% for PF yesterday, but only 16% for PF in 2011. This represents a massive swing of 36% towards PF. In other words the collapsed MMD vote has gone mostly to PF and not UPND. If this sort of trend continues, as is very likely, we may expect a massive PF victory. Whereas PF won by a fairly close 42%-36% in 2011, we are now looking at PF beating UPND by something like 55%-35% in the final count of yesterdays vote, with a collapse of the MMD at about 5% and all other eight parties collecting a miserable 5%. In other words, if the early trend continue, Lungu is going to win with a victory which is somewhere between a landslide and a whitewash. It is a pity that both ZNBC and Muvi TV are completely incapable of any sort of analysis of the meaning of early election results, but are only capable of presenting voting figures as provided by ECZ. The analysis provided here in this posting provides just a little taste of what our media should be doing on a larger scale and in a systematic fashion.
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 09:47:31 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015