Peter Obi, the Presidential candidate of the Labour Party is projected to win the 2023 general elections should a large number of Nigerian voters turn up on election day to vote, says a new poll conducted by Stears.
The poll is the largest public opinion electoral poll on the 2023 Elections with 6,220 Nigerians polled.
The poll projects Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the candidate of the All Progressives Congress to emerge victorious in a low voter turnout scenario.
According to Stears, a pan-African data company, the poll sample was randomly stratified by state and gender to mirror the distribution of registered voters in Nigeria. All 36 states and the FCT were polled. The sample size and breakdown also enables Stears to provide statistically valid predictions at state-level, a unique feature of the 2023 electoral polls made available to the public.
A simple analysis shows that Peter Obi was the preferred winner with 27 percent of all votes cast in his favour, ahead of Bola Ahmed Tinubu (15%) and Atiku Abubakar (12%).
While this is aligned with the results of other polls conducted by ANAP, Nextier, etc, Michael Famoroti, Head of Intelligence and co-founder at stears says it will be hard to draw definite conclusions without examining the large portion of respondents who do not provide a candidate preference. This category of voters make up almost 50 percent of poll results conducted in the past.
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“Where other polls have been inconclusive due to the large share of silent voters, Stears’ proprietary model is able to provide answers by predicting the most likely candidate for silent voters,” said Famoroti.
The Stears proprietary model predicts likely voting patterns for voters who will not willingly divulge the candidate they want to vote for. By deploying the model, Stears is able to provide a comprehensive forecast of the 2023 Presidential elections.
A predictive model helps to make sense of electoral polling data by removing the likelihood of eliminating a substantial portion of voters who declined to reveal their preferred presidential candidate.
This was the case in the ANAP poll where 52 percent of voters were undecided or chose not to reveal their choice of candidates. The Stears poll also experienced a similar scenario with 37 percent of voters closing not to reveal their choice of candidate. These voters also categorised as silent voters are unevenly spread across demographics indicating a need for a more nuanced analysis, Stears said.
To buttress, Stears cites an example of voters in the South East who are most willing to disclose who their preferred candidate is. However, the women generally are reluctant to reveal their choice.
“We started with Stears Elections, an open data project designed to organise all of Nigeria’s election data. In 2019, we built Nigeria’s first real-time election database, and now in 2023, Stears Elections is the most granular way to track all live election results for the Presidential, Gubernatorial, National Assembly, and State Houses of Assembly elections. Ahead of a pivotal moment for the country, there is no better time to apply our analytics expertise to our proprietary election polling data,” says CEO Preston Ideh.
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