Political Survey in The Indonesian Presidential Election

The national campaign for the presidential election has just begun. All candidates, their campaign work teams and constituents have already prepared and run strategies to win the race. Pamphlets, banners and t-shirts depicting photos of the candidates with their respective slogans are printed and created and installed in streets, building and just on trees. No less boisterous is the involvement of various research institutions to participate in this campaign by providing a preliminary assessment based on surveys to the candidates’ chance to win the election. It is however tempting to pose critical questions about those surveys. Why are such surveys conducted prior to the election day, rather than after people give their votes? What do these preliminary findings means and suggest?

The first institution releasing their preliminary survey is the Indonesian Survey Institution that surprisingly announced their finding early that the incumbent president and his running mate, SBY and Boediono, receive more than seventy percent of the total respondent’ choice, leaving two other candidates away who are described to receive far less votes. Critical remarks arose to this survey since it is funded by Fox Foundation, which is also the political consultant of the incumbent’s political party. Regardless of their method and the participants of the survey, it is hard to say that the result is representative, since the credibility and acceptability of JK-Win and Mega-Pro are believed to be increasingly higher.

If you compare LSI survey with popular surveys conducted by mass media both printed and electronic, you might find a different picture, reflecting a competitive result. For example, Kompas online (June 9/09) features a recent survey that challenges an assumption made by the LSI survey. It shows that JK-Win gains 66.94%, Mega-Pro obtain 12.69% and SBY-Boediono only receives 20.37% from 2096 total respondents. Since this is a continuous daily survey and everyone can participate in it by sending a message through his/her own mobile phones, there might be a changing result every day. Yet, this is an obvious clue that different survey yields a different result.

Another example can be seen from the Media Indonesia online (June 9/09). It reveals that SBY-Boediono stands at the highest position gaining 52.8%. While JK-Win gets 11.7%, Mega-Pro receives 31.9% votes from the survey participants. Still another survey by Republika online discloses that until this survey is displayed on June 9/09, SBY-Boediono is still the most favorite candidate receiving 47 %, leaving their contenders who tightly compete to be the runner up. JK-Win and Mega-Pro receive almost the same votes, 26.8% and 26.4% respectively. If you pay attention to other revealed survey staged by the institutions affiliating with each candidate, the result will be more different, showing a more competitive result. All this suggest that it is still difficult to predict who will win the race.

I am neither assured nor doubted with all survey demonstrate. They have their own method and approaches to carry out their own research that might weaken or strengthen their claim. I am not concerned with the result either. What I believe is that the survey now seems to be a means of propagation. Some of them might be purposively designed to conjure up a certain image, persuading voters that this or that candidate is the best. Surveys thus constitute another campaign method rather than a pure research project. Although a pure research project might be itself debatable, but if those political surveys are compared to others relating to academic projects, I am quite certain that the result is much more reliable.

Let us wait and see the real result of the election when it is finally announced by the election commission, hoping that the result represent a fair and democratic process of the political transformation and succession in Indonesia. more importantly, the candidates must be consistent with what they have promised during their campaigns.

Mohamad Abdun Nasir
Indonesian student in Atlanta, GA