With her People’s National Party’s landslide 42-21 victory at the December 29 general election for the 63-member House of Representatives, Portia Simpson Miller took the oath as Prime Minister yesterday for the second time in four years as the pollsters continue to agonize how they got the arithmetic so badly wrong in their forecasts of the likely outcome.
The recurring message from the regular and best known pollsters during the campaign was that the outcome was “too close to call”.
Details of a final poll that was the sole exception in predicting the likelihood of a four per cent winning margin for the PNP were not published.
Here in Barbados, questions are already being asked, across political boundaries: (a) is there a likelihood of the incumbent Democratic Labour Party administration of Prime Minister Freundel Stuart also falling victim to the one-term syndrome – as occurred in St Lucia on November 28 and Jamaica on December 29? (b): likewise, could the Barbadian electorate also prove the pollsters wrong?
After all, Barbados has had a long tradition of giving an incumbent a second chance. Moreover, both the DLP and the BLP have had their respective achievements of successive three-term administrations.
True, prevailing economic and political conditions and leadership structures are quite different from what had made those three-term governments possible for both the Dems and Bees. But, as occurrences in various member states of our Caribbean Community have confirmed, in party politics and with free and fair elections, all things are possible. That’s the nature of the beast.
In relation to Jamaica, declared results for last week’s election revealed that for all the fluctuating forecasts by pollsters, the PNP managed to amass approximately 57 000 more popular votes than the JLP with an estimated 61 per cent voter response.
At the September 2007 election when the JLP won a 32-28 parliamentary majority for the then 60-member House of Representatives, the difference in the valid votes that separated them was a mere one per cent.
For last week’s election, Simpson Miller, the tough, seasoned veteran politician, kept forecasting her party’s return to government.
It is, however, doubtful that even Simpson Miller, herself had envisaged such an overwhelming popular victory when the preliminary results were declared shortly after midnight on Friday.
Or, for that matter, whether Holness and his team of strategists had preferred to ignore the negative signals coming from marginal constituencies.
Now, except for talk of likely “magisterial recounts” in some constituencies, it’s the PNP‘s Simpson Miller again as Prime Minister to face the tough economic challenges with the International Monetary Fund on watch.
