Things have been looking a bit hopeless for presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto in terms of his chances of beating incumbent President Joko Widodo in April’s election, his campaign having suffered a number of significant PR disasters recently while he lags far behind in most polls.
But the Gerindra chairman’s campaign got a bit of relatively good news this week in the form of the latest poll from the National Survey Media Institute (Median), which still shows Prabowo behind by double digits but with a far smaller electability gap than most previous polls had shown.
The Median survey, which was conducted from November 4-16, showed Jokowi and his running mate Ma’ruf Amin with 47% versus Prabowo and his running mate Sandiaga Uno with 35.5%. It was based on a multistage random sampling of 1,200 voters from across all of Indonesia. Undecided voters made up 16.8%.
A previous Median survey from July (before Prabowo and Jokowi’s candidacies were made official and their running mates were announced) Jokowi got 36.2% compared to 20.4% for Prabowo.
Although the new Median survey still puts Prabowo 11.5% behind Jokowi, those results are a great improvement over other recent polling, such as one from the Alvara Research Center conducted in mid-October that showed Jokowi with 54.1% compared to 33.9% for Prabowo (representing a slightly increased lead for Jokowi over their last poll). Most other recent polls have put the incumbent’s lead at around 20% over Prabowo.
“The survey is good news for us, it shows a red light for Pak Jokowi,” Prabowo-Sandi campaign spokesperson Suhud Alynudin told reporters today as quoted by Detik.
In addition to closing the gap, Suhuh also argued that incumbents with poll numbers below 50% are likely to be defeated, based on empirical evidence. He also said that it was unlikely that Jokowi’s support levels could improve much at this point whereas Prabowo will be working hard to win the support of swing voters over the next four months.
Until more recent survey data comes out it’s hard to say if this poll was an outlier or representative of a trend. But considering all of the controversies the Gerindra chairman’s campaign has created for itself (the backlash over his position on Australia’s decision to move their embassy in Israel to Jerusalem being just the latest), it feel hard for us to believe that he could’ve gained that many more supporters in the last few weeks.
But who knows? At any rate, its still a long ways until election day on April 17 and a lot can happen before then.