Will by-election results reflect the growing discontent toward PAP?

By: Hoe Zong Huan

With a by-election coming up, it may be interesting to put the 2011 General Election results under analysis to reveal the trend and attitudes towards the PAP. With the elections being described as a watershed one, the 6% drop in the popular votes seemed to be an almost muted reaction given the severity of the discontent against the PAP. The bigger question is therefore: did the votes swing by a mere 6%?

Any politician competing within the Singaporean political landscape would know that it would be pointless to try and influence votes who have already pledged their allegiance to a single party. Swing voters are therefore the most popular target demographic for politicians trying to market because of their relative open-mindedness towards new parties and policies. At the same time, these voters arguably give the most accurate view of what they feel because their political orientations have not been set in stone.

With that in mind, let’s examine the 2011 General Election results through simple math, simplified for casual reading. There were approximately 2.1 million eligible voters in 2011, of which about 100,000 were new citizens who were most likely to give their votes to the PAP. Thus, it would not be wrong to assert that the PAP may very well have a 4.7% increase in popular votes entirely attributable to these new citizens.

Further examining our above assumption, let us assume that that 35% (735,000) are core opposition supporters whilst 40% (840,000) are core PAP supporters. Subtracting these numbers from the total number of eligible voters, the number of swing votes essentially amount to approximately 425,000. Through simple extrapolation, the 6% drop in votes means that 126,000 popular votes have swung away from the PAP out of the 425,000 neutral voters. Taken in this context, this means a 30% drop in support for the PAP with more and more voters turning their support away from them in recent times.

It would most certainly be interesting to see how the opposition would fare in the Punggol East by-elections, especially since there are much less new citizens in the constituency when compared to other election spots and the fact that rising discontent under the PAP has never been so heated 18 months after 2011.