He can certainly draw a crowd. In any election, it should go without saying, that is always an advantage. With some 200,000 faithful members of the El Shaddai Catholic charismatic movement in attendance every week, Mike Velarde’s prayer rallies are a candidate’s answered prayer.

(Of course, there is that wonderful throwaway line from the inimitable Teresa of Avila, who knew a thing or two about politics, or at least the politics of organizations, about more tears being shed in heaven over answered prayers than unanswered ones, but that, as they say, is altogether another story).

Tonight, Brother Mike (as the El Shaddai founder is familiarly known) starts making his short list of 18 Senate candidates known. I had thought he would endorse at least 15, maybe 18, candidates — something I had wanted to write about last Tuesday.

I had wondered about his appeal to the country’s Catholic bishops, last month, for the church leaders to recommend 18 candidates for the laity to choose from: why 18, and not 12, the number of seats at stake in the Senate race? Later it dawned on me that political considerations had in all probability forced Velarde’s hand. He certainly had to endorse at least one, perhaps all three, of the Kapatiran candidates; since he did not put a premium on popularity (at least not in public), he couldn’t possibly turn the Kapatiran appeal down. The candidates and their party platform met his criteria almost to a tee.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

I share Manolo’s enthusiasm. Inquirer.net’s Philippine election map offers political junkies (to borrow that familiar blurb on many a box of toys) “hours and hours of fun.”

Serious fun too: The interactive map offers visual proof of a defining quality of Philippine politics, at least as this journalist understands it. Filipinos like to vote. (Corollarily, an election boycott is almost un-Filipino.)

Consider only the most famous instances: Those in the opposition who took part in the 1984 parliamentary elections (”participation without illusion”) and in the 1986 “snap” presidential election had a better grip on what Filipino voters wanted, and thus a better claim to being the electorate’s true representatives.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

I was already out of the newsroom when the question occurred to me. Why did Jun Ducat, millionaire businessman and master attention-seeker, schedule the release of his hostages at seven in the evening? Inquirer Compact had already gone to bed, but I still called up Abel, our executive editor, to inflict my take on him. (He was kind enough to hear me out.) The release was set for 7pm because that’s when the country’s two major newscasts air. (ABS-CBN starts earlier, but by seven in the evening GMA’s is on the air too.)

Ducat wanted maximum coverage, and he got it, live, on national TV. Or perhaps we should say, Ducat and company?

ABS-CBN reports that the police is now looking at the political gimmick angle, in part because the grenades turned out to be duds. (The, ah, prescient Chavit Singson raised the possibility, when he was interviewed over GMA last night, saying for all he knew the grenades could have been real but empty.) Truly, given Ducat’s first hostage-taking a decade ago, past is prologue.

ABS-CBN also reports that, as reader Jim and I have just discussed over in the previous post’s comment thread, both Singson and Bong Revilla did not in fact follow protocol, and defied express police instructions not to enter the bus.

(Kudos to ABS-CBN for being the first to bring this story to the next level.)

If, as President Arroyo said after the hostages were released, the incident was “prank terrorism,” shouldn’t charges be filed against those who were, let us say, accomplices in the prank?

By Monday night, or Tuesday morning at the latest, our discussion of survey “trends” will either be instantly obsolete, or confirmed. Well, maybe not confirmed, but at least made marginally more useful. That’s when the latest SWS poll results will be released.

In the meantime, let’s resume crunching the numbers again (again, keeping the usual caveats in mind).

4. TV advertising has had a marked impact on some, but certainly not all, campaigns. Chiz Escudero is an obvious beneficiary: From a low of 19.3 in November (statistically in the same ballpark as his July rating of 20.2; if the absolute numbers mean anything, however, the slide must have been due to the early end of the second impeachment proceedings in the House), he rose to 23.2 in January and then, after the campaign period officially started (and TV started airing his ads), zoomed up to 35.5 in March.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

Let’s take a look at those Pulse Asia results, in the rather crude chronology I strung together. Aside from those old workhorses, name recall and heavy adspend, what other factors do we see pushing up, or pulling down, the candidates’ prospects?

1. Two of the consistent Top 3 candidates ran in the last elections: Loren Legarda for vice president, of course, and Ping Lacson for president. That simple fact must have added to their electability. Running a national campaign forces a candidate to put up a national organization; Legarda’s organizational prowess in 2004 was especially impressive. Ping’s presidential campaign was no slouch, either; it met its stated goal, of securing over 3 million votes. (This, in my view, effectively cost Fernando Poe Jr. the margin of error he needed to counter any election fraud, but that, as they say, is another story.)

But organization is not the only advantage Loren and Ping enjoy; the publicity they reaped from running strong campaigns (and of course from the post-election positions they took) has, in my view, helped them retain their impressive ratings. Ping did not do as well the first time he ran for the Senate; SWS surveys showed him at 27-28 percent in the last three months of the 2001 campaign. He eventually placed 10th. Loren, as any political junkie knows, topped the 1998 Senate elections. In the first two months of the 1998 campaign, however, as measured by SWS surveys, she was solidly in the middle ring of the winners’ circle.

One possible implication for 2007. Loren may become only the second person in our history to top the Senate elections more than once. (Jovito Salonga holds the record. He ran three times, and topped the race each time.)

[Read the rest of this entry »]

A discussion in Newsstand led me to collate the following poll results from the four Pulse Asia surveys — July 2006, November 2006, January 2007, March 2007 — on the current Senate race. I think a closer look at these results, now strung together in a crude timeline, will prove profitable (with the usual caveats, of course).

The first three have a margin of error of plus/minus 3; the fourth, which was conducted as though it were an electoral exercise, had a bigger sample and is more accurate, with a margin of error of plus/minus 2. 

I realize that pollsters can, at times, make mistakes. But if we limit ourselves to the Social Weather Stations and Pulse Asia surveys, bring our own experience to bear on our reading of the results, engage the polling process critically, and bear in mind that  successful politicians read the surveys too, perhaps we can get somewhere, yes?

pulse-2007.htm

Let’s crunch the numbers later.