SMRC: Defeating Prabowo, Ganjar's Electability Skyrockets With Critical Voters

Central Java Governor Ganjar Pranowo. (doc. Central Java Provincial Government Public Relations)

JAKARTA - The survey results of the Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting Institute (SMRC) show that Ganjar Pranowo's electability outperforms Prabowo Subianto in the critical voter criteria for the 2024 election.

"In the head-to-head simulation or two names, Ganjar received 42.2 percent support and Prabowo Subianto 41.9 percent," said SMRC Research Director Deni Irvani in a written statement, Sunday, May 7, quoted by Antara.

Deni explained that critical voters are voters who have better access to political social information sources, because they have cell phones and can access the internet to find out and behave towards social-political news.

Critical voters generally are lower to upper middle class voters, are more educated, and tend to live in urban areas. They also tend to better influence the opinion of the voter group below.

"The total number of critical voters nationally is estimated at 80 percent," he said.

SMRC conducted a survey on May 2-5, 2023. The selection of samples in the survey was carried out through a random digit dialing method (RDD). RDD is a technique of selecting samples through a random phone number generation process.

The survey's margin of error is estimated at 3.3 percent at a 95 percent confidence level in the simple random sampling assumption.

Deni revealed that in the head-to-head simulation in March-April 2023, Prabowo Subianto tended to excel over Ganjar. However, when entering May after Ganjar Pranowo's declaration by the PDI-P, Ganjar began to balance Prabowo.

In fact, in simulations among those who know the two, Ganjar has overtaken Prabowo. In the simulation of the same level of recognition, Ganjar won 46.6 percent of the vote; while Prabowo only reached 38.8 percent or did not reach 40 percent.

"In the last survey, in the voter group who knew both of them, Ganjar Pranowo got 46.4 percent. Then, Prabowo was 38.8 percent and there was 14.4 percent who didn't know," said Deni.

For information, the registration of prospective presidential and vice presidential candidates is scheduled for October 19 to November 25, 2023.

Based on Law Number 7 of 2017 concerning Elections (UU Pemilu), pairs of presidential and vice presidential candidates are proposed by political parties or coalitions of political parties participating in the election who meet the requirements for obtaining seats of at least 20 percent of the total seats in the DPR or obtaining 25 percent of valid votes nationally in the previous election for members of the DPR.

Currently, there are 575 seats in parliament, so that the pairs of presidential and vice-presidential candidates in the 2024 presidential election must have at least 115 seats in the DPR RI. It is also possible that the candidate pairs can be promoted by political parties or a combination of political parties participating in the 2019 Election with a total valid vote acquisition of at least 34,992,703 votes.