With less than three months until the presidential election on April 17, observers have been watching Indonesia’s polls closely to help prognosticate who may emerge the winner. For the last few months, those polls have consistently shown President Joko Widodo to have a healthy double digit lead over his challenger, Prabowo Subianto.
But a new poll, the first taken entirely this new year shows Prabowo within single digit striking distance of the incumbent. It could indicate that the challenger has experienced a significant electoral boost of late or that the survey is a statistical outlier or, as one Jokowi campaign member sinisterly suggested, that the survey group rigged their results for political purposes.
The new poll results by the National Survey Media Institute (Median) showed Jokowi and his running mate Mar’uf Amin being picked by 47.9% of respondents. Prabowo and his running mate Sandiaga Uno received 38.7%, or a 9.2% difference between the two tickets. The percentage of respondents who said they were undecided or abstaining was 13.4%.
The survey was taken from January 6-15 (so before last week’s first presidential debate) and involved 1,500 respondents from across the country.
Median says they are an independent research group and that the survey was funded independently. However, one member of the Jokowi-Ma’ruf campaign cast shade on the survey, saying it could represent something more sinister because of its deviation from other recent poll results.
“If the survey’s results are unusual, it should be suspected that the survey institution is building political framing,” Jokowi-Ma’ruf campaign spokesperson Ace Hasan Syadzily wrote in a statement picked up by Kompas on Tuesday.
The Golkar politician noted that the majority of other survey institutions put Jokowi-Ma’ruf with strong double digit leads over Prabowo-Sandiaga, many close to around 20 percentage points.
As he pointed out, that electoral gap was shown in the most recent polling from the Populi Center, the Indonesian Survey Circle (LSI), Kompas’ R&D survey and Indikator Politik, all of which also showed that Jokowi-Ma’ruf’s electability was above 50%.
“Only Median shows Jokowi’s electability at 47.9%. If you find such a difference from one survey institution, it’s reasonable to be suspicious of their motives and the reliability of their methodology,” wrote Ace.
Ace accused Median further by stating that their latest survey results seems to deliberately match internal survey data from Prabowo-Sandiaga’s camp.
Although the challenger’s campaign had previously claimed that Prabowo’s polling numbers were much higher than other polling institutes, in response to the Median’s survey they now claim that their most recent polling data shows Prabowo-Sandi down by just 4%.
Median’s last survey, done November 4-16, showed Jokowi-Ma’ruf at 47% versus Prabowo-Sandi with 35.5%. It was also an outlier as most other polls around that time had the incumbent’s lead at around 20% over Prabowo.
For comparison, here are the results of four of the other most recent surveys by other polling groups.
Charta Politika:
Jokowi-Ma’ruf Amin: 53.2%
Prabowo-Sandiaga: 34.1%
Period: Dec 22 – Jan 8
Y-Publica
Jokowi-Ma’ruf Amin: 53.5%
Prabowo-Sandiaga: 31.9%
Periode: Dec 26 – Jan 8
Alvara Research Center
Jokowi-Ma’ruf Amin: 54,3%
Prabowo-Sandiaga: 35,1%
Period: Dec 11-24
Survei Indikator
Jokowi-Ma’ruf Amin: 54.9%
Prabowo-Sandiaga: 34.8%
Period: Dec 16-26
Reader Interactions