ECONOMYNEXT — Sri Lanka leftist leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake had a 1-percent edge on opposition leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake, a poll for July showed, with a continuing upward trend for President Ranil Wickremesinghe also evident.
The Institute for Health Policy (IHP)’s Sri Lanka Opinion Tracker Survey (SLOTS) Multilevel Regression and Poststratification (MRP) provisional estimates of presidential election voting intent for July 2024 showed that Dissanayake and Premadasa leading neck and neck (37 percent and 36 percent respectively each within the margin of error) but with both at less than 40 percent of all adults.
IHP said in a statement on Thursday August 29 that, at the same time, July saw a continuing surge for President Ranil Wickremesinghe, whose support grew to 23 percent. Support for a generic Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) candidate remained unchanged at 4 percent, with Namal Rajapaksa only declaring as a candidate in August.
“Analysis of the June–July estimates indicate some differences in who is supporting each candidate. Support for Dissanayake was strongest in the youth, a majority of whom supported him (54 percent), as well as among Sinhala voters (41 percent) and the most affluent third of voters (42 percent). In contrast, Premadasa led among the poorest third of voters (42 percent) and among minorities (51 percent in Sri Lankan Tamils and 65 percent in Muslims). President Wickremesinghe’s support increased with age, reaching 38 percent in those aged 60 years and older, and he obtained more support amongst women (26 percent) than in men (17 percent). Otherwise, his support was mostly evenly distributed across other demographics,” IHP said.
SLOTS polling director Dr Ravi Rannan-Eliya was quoted in the statement as saying that Dissanayake’s strength is due not only to
support amongst the young, but also to winning the biggest share of disaffected Gotabaya Rajapaksa voters.
“President Wickremesinghe’s initial strength has also been due to support from that same group since he was only picking up one in five of voters who supported Premadasa in 2019,” he said.
IHP said that their estimates use the IHP SLOTS MRP model (01/2024 revision). This update is for all adults and uses data from 19,015 interviews conducted from October 2021 to 19 August 2024, including 701 interviews during July 2024, and 497 interview in August. One hundred bootstraps were run to capture model uncertainty, with margins of error assessed at 1–3 percent for July.
“IHP is planning to expand its interview numbers in the coming weeks and hopes that its next estimates will be more robust.
IHP’s SLOTS MRP methodology first estimates the relationship between a wide variety of characteristics about respondents and their opinions – in this case, ‘If there was a presidential election today, who would you vote for?’– in a multilevel statistical model that also smooths month to month changes. It then uses a large data file calibrated to the national population to predict voting intent in each month since October 2021, based on what the multilevel model indicates about their probability of voting for various parties (‘post-stratification’) at each point in time. The multilevel model was estimated 100 times to reflect underlying uncertainties in the model and to obtain margins of error. The voting intent results for previous months have changed in this update as more data were collected after the last release and these changes are within the margin of error.” (Colombo/Aug29/2024)