CENTUS NWEZE REPORTING
A new sub urban poll by Reportera, a news platform, had put Peter Obi, presidential candidate of Labour Party, LP, ahead of his competition in main stream political platform.
Obi is contesting in next month’s presidential election against rugged politicians but with largely tainted profiles.
Bola Tinubu, ex Lagos State governor with a political history pork Marked with charges and suspicion of drug running, financial malfeasances, prebendary politicking and so on, is running under the banners of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, and former vice president, Atiku Abubakar, also suffering credibility crisis is running under the platform of People’s Democratic Party, erstwhile ruling party.
The LP candidate has been leading in major credible polls like ANAP/NOI polls, Bloomberg and many others.
There has been criticisms of the previous polls, however, over percieved concentration of the pollen population in the urban areas.
Reportera, however says that it took its own survey to the suburbans with result showing that Obi is in the lead.
The poll was conducted in the remote areas of rural and suburban settlements using statistical instruments with empirical data sampled from the country’s 36 states including the FCT.
“The figures project Peter Obi of LP for a victory in the first ballot of the 2023 presidential elections, if only rural voters were considered,” the survey said.
For this poll, 740 respondents aged between 18 and 55 (20 respondents per state) filled out a questionnaire where they indicated their preferred candidate amongst the top 4 candidates for the Aso rock top job.
Peter Obi of LP (38%) edged out Ahmed Tinubu of APC (33%) to take the lead while the PDP candidate former VP Atiku Abubakar trailed them closely with a quarter of the respondents voting in his favour at 26%.
The top three candidates are all projected to score the INEC required minimum of 25% of the votes cast across 24 states, only Kwankwaso of NNPP will most likely not meet up with this clause.
The poll predicts a first ballot victory for Mr Peter Obi (LP)
Reportera explained that it embarked on rural/suburban poll because previous polls have been heavily criticized for sampling population in the more liberal urban centers and state capitals of the country which doesn’t truly represent the electorate.
“Some political commentators have argued that there are more voters in the cumulative rural areas of a state as opposed to just their state’s capital. The Labour Party candidate has come top in previous polls so this time, we decided to focus on the rural areas to get a different analytical point of reference ahead of the February 25th presidential election.
“For example, instead of collecting data from Minna(Niger state) which is a capital city, we opted for the far less developed Kabas, Madara, Kagara etc. which affords us a very different viewpoint on the candidates popularity across rural settlements,” Reportera said.