News
Holness’ JLP surges ahead in the polls
Jamaica Prime Minister., Andrew Holness
The Jamaica Labor Party (JLP) and Prime Minister Andrew Holness have surged into the lead, gaining six percentage points in the past month, as the party and candidate most likely to win the December 29 general election.
The opposition People’s National Party (PNP) and Portia Simpson-Miller should not be counted out.
According to the latest Bill Johnson public-opinion poll conducted nation-wide on December 10 and 12, Johnson’s team found that if the election were held today, 31 percent of the voters would put their ‘X’ beside the bell, the symbol of the Jamaica Labor Party (JLP), while a further 5 percent of the voters say they would probably vote JLP, giving the Holness-led JLP a solid 36 percent support.
For the PNP, 29 percent of voters say they would definitely put their ‘X’ beside its symbol, the head. A further 3 percent say they would probably vote for the PNP. That leaves the Simpson Miller-led party with 32 percent support or four percentage points behind the JLP.
With the poll having a sampling error of plus or minus 4 percent, the parties are in a statistical dead heat, but what should worry the PNP is that this is the first time it has trailed the JLP in any Johnson poll since 2007.
The PNP’s troubles are compounded by the fact that despite its campaigning over the past month, its support has remained at 32 percent, which the Johnson team found when it tested the pulse of the nation in November.
In the meantime, the JLP has seen its support move from 29 to 36 percent, a seven-percentage point gain since November.
The undecided population has made the expected decline as the country gets closer to election day, dropping from 13 percent in November to 9 percent this time around, with all of those persons moving to the JLP.
The persons who say they will not vote also declined by two percentage points in the past month with the JLP again the beneficiary of that switch.
For the persons who say they will vote JLP, 34 percent say that’s because of tradition, 19 percent say Holness deserves a chance, while 18 percent say the party is better than the PNP.
An almost equal number of persons – 36 percent say they will vote PNP because of tradition, 16 percent say it would do a better job of managing the affairs of the country and 10 percent say the PNP is better than the JLP.
Of the persons who are undecided or will not vote, 24 percent are not interested in politics, 15 percent say neither of the two major political parties has helped them as individuals, and a combined 26 percent say neither the PNP nor the JLP has helped the country and it will make no difference which is running the affairs of the State.
The latest poll has a sample size of 1,008 and was conducted in all 63 constituencies across Jamaica.