EDITORIAL: Amid the noise, shock polls point to ANC implosion
There is much debate over which polls are accurate — but all of them paint a picture of storm clouds over the ANC
Could the ANC’s share of the vote actually fall below 40% in 2024? It seems it’s more than a distinct possibility.
Over the weekend, Rapport newspaper, citing the ANC’s own polling, placed its support at under 40% in two years’ time.
The poll has been viewed with a healthy dose of scepticism by observers, who rightly note that polling in SA has never been hugely accurate, and that it fails to take actual voter turnout into account.
Elections analyst Dawie Scholtz, highly regarded for his keen eye for electoral trends and largely accurate election modelling, was not convinced, given the scant detail of the poll.
Another poll, released this week by market research firm Ipsos and published by the Daily Maverick, placed support for the ANC at 42%. Again, that study had huge margins for error.
DA federal council chair Helen Zille has also weighed in. In a podcast with the FM this week, Zille told Peter Bruce that the DA’s own internal polling — which is generally pretty accurate — places ANC support at between 40% and 42%.
While the numbers vary, there are some discernible patterns. In particular, it suggests that if the next general election were to be held tomorrow, ANC support would have plunged by over 10 percentage points since the last election in 2019, when it received a fortuitous 57%. At the time, the country was fuelled by “Ramaphoria” after the ANC’s watershed 2017 national conference elected Cyril Ramaphosa to the helm.
As Zille says: “The ANC polling itself is putting it at 38%. That is a critical point, so they are seeing what voters are saying.”
Typically, the ANC performs better in national elections than at local government level, which is just as well since in the 2021 local election it slipped below 50% to a record low of 45.6%. In that election, most of the country’s eight major cities were taken over by opposition-led coalitions.
But is such a sea change in voter sentiment even possible? Caution over these polls is warranted, but, clearly, it is the ANC’s race to lose.
For the first time in its democratic history, SA had to manage a global pandemic — but in true ANC fashion, funds to address the crisis were looted.
A second point is that Ramaphosa has proved to be no messiah. While he has sought to clean up the party, he has dithered on axing some of the most compromised members of his cabinet.
A post-Zuma era required an extraordinarily audacious leader to extricate SA — and the ANC — from the ruins. But Ramaphosa has been anything but.
Third, change in the ANC itself has thus far been simply cosmetic, with no real commitment to better governance, despite the warning shots from the electorate in 2021.
But the most damning indictment of the ANC ahead of the 2024 polls — even though partly attributable to the Ukraine war — is the cost of living crisis.
No South African has been spared. Coupled with load-shedding, mismanagement of the economy and out-of-control crime, there was never a worse time for the ANC to face the electorate.
So while there may be plenty of noise in those polls, if ever there was a time the ANC deserved a drubbing in the voting booth, it is now.