ECONOMYNEXT — There is substantially more support for the ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) and President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s United National Party (UNP) than there is for either party’s presidential candidate, the Institute for Health Policy (IHP)’s monthly poll has found.
(IHP)’s Sri Lanka Opinion Tracker Survey (SLOTS) polling director Dr Ravi Rannan-Eliya was quoted as saying in a statement from the institute that its parliamentary election voting intent survey has revealed “substantially more support for the SLPP in a general election than for their presidential candidate, and similarly more support for Wickremesinghe’s presidential candidacy than for the UNP”.
“It would be unwise to write off the SLPP as a political force, since many SLPP voters appeared in August to be switching their presidential vote to Ranil Wickremesinghe. Of course, they could also do this using their second preference votes, which suggests limited voter understanding of that option,” he said.
IHP’s voting intent poll for August showed that Sri Lanka’s main opposition Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) and the leftist National People’s Power (NPP) were almost tied though both parties saw a drop compared to July.
The institute’s SLOTS Multilevel Regression and Poststratification (MRP) model (revised in January 2024) showed no substantial changes in August compared to the previous month, the institute said in a statement on Tuesday September 17.
According to the statement, the SJB and the NPP led and were in a statistical tie with 29 percent and 28 percent of voter support, respectively, followed by the ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) with 19 percent, President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s United National Party (UNP) with 9 percent, and the Ilankai Thamil Arasu Kachchi (ITAK) with 4 percent.
Support for the SJB and NPP dropped by 3 and 2 percent, respectively, in August compared to July, but the changes are within the margin of error. The August estimates are provisional and carry a margin of error of 2–3 percent for the two leading parties, IHP said.
Compared to IHP’s August release, the estimates of NPP and SJB support in July 2024 were revised downward by 2 points each.
“These estimates are for all adults, not just for likely voters. They are based on the January 2024 revision of the IHP SLOTS MRP model. IHP is working on improving its likely voter model and will resume the release of voting intent in likely voters in a future update. It should be noted that differences in voting intent shares between all adults and likely voters have typically been 1–2 percent for most estimates in the past two years.
“This August 2024 update is based on 19,721 interviews conducted with adults across Sri Lanka since October 2021, including 1,153 interviews during August. 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 General Election today, which
party would you vote for?’– in a multilevel statistical model. It then uses a large data file that is calibrated to the national population to predict voting intent in each month since October 2021, according to what the multilevel model says 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/Sep18/2024)