The Star Newspaper on Tuesday released an opinion poll results between the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) leader Raila Odinga and deputy president William Ruto.
The monthly opinion polls conducted by the Radio Africa Group revealed that Raila Odinga has overtaken Deputy President William Ruto in the presidential contest.
However, William Ruto and his allies have treated this latest poll casually after trailing behind, something which may cost him the presidency in 2022.
These leaders dismissed the polls as fake and according to them, opinion polls are only credible if William Ruto is ahead of Raila. Anything portraying Raila ahead of Ruto is fake, stage managed and not credible according to Tangatanga leaders.
Instead of carefully analyzing the reasons why Ruto is trailing behind Raila and working towards improving those factors, these leaders are fooling the deputy president by consoling him using the “fake opinion poll” tag.
Led by one Kapseret MP and Ruto’s mouthpiece Oscar Sudi, he bitterly dismissed the poll as uncredible: “This is not The Star authoring this newspaper, it’s the Deep State doing their routine work. Tumewazoea hawa wakora. They are bitter because we are ahead of them by 24%. Wakora wa kawaida.” Wrote Sudi.
Well, they say one of the silly mistakes in politics is to underestimate your opponent (something which Ruto’s ignorant team is perfectly doing).
It should be noted that the deputy president used to lead in 95% of opinion polls as late as last year and it seems that these leaders are still living in those past days.
What they fail to understand is that by the time Ruto was leading in most polls, Raila Odinga had not even declared that he would vie for the presidency. Put in another way, the deputy president was competing against himself since the other opponents had not even started to mount serious campaigns across the country, unlike him who began to campaign after the 2017 general elections. Besides, Raila was still preoccupied with the BBI and he focused all his energy campaigning for the document as opposed to selling himself.
Secondly, president Uhuru Kenyatta had not thrown his weight behind the ODM leader and so most people believed that he would be betrayed. Those were good fodder for William Ruto and he was scoring as high as 70% in almost all opinion polls as Raila trailed behind with less than 30%.
Most importantly, there was a perception that Kalonzo would not back Raila Odinga and that his chances of winning were very minimal. With all these factors, it was only fair for William Ruto to shine in those polls.
Fast-forward, some major events happened in the country ranging from Uhuru holding the Sagana 3 meeting, Kalonzo joining Raila and the ODM leader officially declaring that he would vie in 2022 having been endorsed by the Azimio La Umoja coalition.
It is on the above grounds that 47.4 percent of respondents said they would vote for Raila as president if elections were held today, compared to Ruto’s 43.4 per cent.
According to the Star, support for Raila as the next president jumped from 35.1 per cent in February to 47.4 per cent in March, a jump of 12.3 per cent.
On the other hand, Support for Ruto dropped from 47.4 per cent in February to 43.4 per cent in March.
The poll surveyed 3,152 respondents between March 7 and 11 by computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) across all 47 counties with a margin error of 1.75 per cent.
The new poll added that no other presidential candidate will get a significant chunk of the vote. For instance, Wiper Leader Kalonzo Musyoka would only get 1.9 per cent of the votes, while the rest of the presidential candidates would get just 1.2%.
To further prove that Raila is doing better than Ruto, 49.3 percent said they would vote for the ODM leader while only 42% would back the deputy president. Mature voters also preferred the ODM leader as the best for the country.
The poll closed on the same day that Kalonzo Musyoka and his One Kenya Alliance brigade joined Azimio and declared ‘Raila Tosha’.
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