For the third straight time, poll predicts Peter Obi winner of 2023 election

For the third straight time, Peter Obi, candidate of the Labour Party has been predicted as winner of the forthcoming presidential election.

Nigerians are preparing for the presidential election which is scheduled for February 25, only nine days from now.

According to the poll commissioned by Anap Foundation and conducted by NOI polls Limited (NOIPolls), this is “the third Poll in the series was concluded in the first half of February 2023 and follows two earlier polls carried out (using the exact same methodology) in September and December 2022. We believe our baseline Presidential Poll published on September 15, 2022 was the first well-publicised national poll released in connection with the 2023 Presidential elections, which was followed by a Bloomberg poll published on September 28, 2022.”

The foundation said it is pertinent to mention that the methodology used by NOIPolls is almost the exact same methodology that was used in previous presidential polls that they handled for us in 2011, 2015 and 2019.

“In all those past presidential polls, the front-runner that was identified by our polls ended up winning the elections, irrespective of a rather large percentage of voters who were undecided and/or refused to indicate who their preferred candidate was. We have also applied the exact same methodology in our various Governorship Polls carried out in 2011, 2014, 2015, 2019 and 2022 and the methodology generally held up well. We are of course aware of some significant differences between the 2023 Presidential race and those of prior years e.g. 1) A longer Campaign season: 2) the presence of 4 major candidates instead of 2; and 3) greater voter enthusiasm,” the poll report signed by Atedo Peterside, president and founder of the foundation.

“In December 2022, we took the extra step to expand the methodology in our 2nd Presidential Poll in this series by carrying out 3 different polls using sample sizes of 1,000, 2,000 and 3,000 and confirmed that (as expected) the results did not
change significantly. This notwithstanding, we chose a sample size of 2,000 for our third and final poll in February 2023 as opposed to the 1,000 sample size we used for the published September and December 2022 polls.

“Our 3rd and final poll result in February 2023 reveals that Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) remains in the lead, with Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and Alhaji Atiku Abubakar of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) both trailing him. Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP)
emerged as the lone outsider. Peter Obi leads, with 21% of registered voters proposing to vote for him if the
presidential election were to be conducted today, and 13% proposing to vote for Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu who fell in
second place. Alhaji Atiku Abubakar was third with 10% and Rabiu Kwankwaso was a distant fourth with 3% of voters proposing to vote for him.”

Read also: Four 2023 presidential candidates’ fate lie on the thumbs of undecided voters says ANAP poll

It was noted in the report that given the large pool of undecided voters and/or those who refused to disclose their preferred choice, Peter Obi’s 8%-point lead at this stage is significant, but not sufficient to separate him from a leading pack of candidates scoring 13%, 10% and 3%. 

“Undecided voters and those who prefer not to reveal their preferred candidate add up to a whopping 23% and 30% respectively. The gender split of undecided voters shows that 27% of women are undecided
versus 18% of male registered voters,” the report said.

The foundation said its conclusion is that, using its tried and tested method of sampling since 2011, the 2023 presidential elections are too close to call notwithstanding the fact that, whoever was at the top of the polls based on this exact same methodology in 2011, 2015 and 2019 eventually won the elections.

“This time Peter Obi has been the front-runner throughout, but we caution that the undecided/refused vote is still too high (in early February 2023) to be ignored,” the foundation said. “We had thought that by delaying our 3rd and Final Poll until early February 2023 we would see a collapse of the Undecided Vote. The reality is that the reduction in the Undecided Vote has been more than offset by the increase in the number of voters who refuse to disclose the name of their preferred candidate. When we carried out our first baseline poll in September 2022 we thought a long campaign period would lead to different candidates taking turns to lead the field. That has not been the case. This long drawn out race has been surprisingly stagnant.”