Surveys were first used in the 1953 presidential elections and they have been an invaluable — but not always infallible — guide to candidates ever since.

by Yvonne T. Chua

	Senator John Osmeña (right), shown being endorsed by Eduardo Cojuangco Jr. in 1998, is confident he will win another Senate term because the surveys say so.

SENATOR John Osmeña is certain he will win again in the May elections. The numbers say so, he crowed in an evening talk show, where he whipped out the results of a poll he had commissioned the survey outfit Social Weather Stations (SWS) to do last year.

The survey, which ran from August 30 to September 14, 2003 showed the grizzled politician from Cebu ranking third to fourth in the lengthy list of probable senatorial candidates. He fared particularly well in Mindanao (he placed second), and among the men, as well as among the D and E classes.

With the numbers squarely behind him, Osmeña didn’t have to go begging any political party to draft him. Instead, the parties came knocking on his door. He is now part of the administration’s K4 senatorial slate, supposedly after exacting a pledge that it would back his son John Henry Gregory’s (‘John-John’) candidacy for the governorship of Cebu.

Osmeña belongs to the fast-expanding tribe of politicians that knows the value of checking out — even commissioning — well-executed surveys before embarking on risky and expensive undertakings like gunning for public office, thanks chiefly to the accuracy with which local scientific public opinion polls have predicted the outcome of elections. But politicians have found other uses for polls, such as gauging the mood of the public on a particular issue or measuring the impact of a campaign message, so much so that Philippine politics could be said to have become much like a legal version of jueteng — a numbers game. Of course, survey firms would probably balk at that description, since they are always dead serious about their work, which they emphasize is no game of chance.

To be sure, there are many misconceptions about surveys. As it is, many people still find it hard to believe that a small sample of 1,200 respondents can accurately predict the outcome of an election. But independent survey organizations have repeatedly demonstrated that this can be done. The SWS’s final pre-election survey for the 1992 presidential race, for instance, showed Fidel Ramos and Miriam Santiago in a close fight (26.8 percent to 25 percent). The one it did in the 1998 elections showed Joseph Estrada pulling away from his opponents (33 percent).

The results of the SWS polls were just a few percentage points off the official count by the Commission on Elections (Comelec). The outcome of its exit poll for the presidential race, first conducted in 1998, was even closer to the official count.

Contrary to what many people assume, elections surveys are also hardly new in the Philippines, having been around since the 1950s. The difference is that in the past, the surveys were not published as they are now.

A research done by top SWS honchos Mahar Mangahas and Linda Luz Guerrero identifies George Cohen as one of the pioneers in opinion polling in the country. Robot Statistics, the firm Cohen founded, did confidential election research in the 1953, 1961, and 1965 elections by conducting polls in key cities. The results were pretty accurate such that when Cohen found the surveys showing his client, President Diosdado Macapagal, would lose to Ferdinand Marcos in the 1965 elections, he decided against disclosing the results in public. That year, Mangahas and Guerrero write, “fearing the hostility of Ferdinand Marcos, the 1965 winner,” Cohen emigrated and Robot closed.

But there were Filipino pollsters of note at the time, too, and they engaged in open or nonconfidential polling, according to Mangahas and Guerrero. Enrique T. Virata, a statistician from the University of the Philippines, ran a Quezon City mail survey in 1957 that foresaw the victory of Carlos P. Garcia. Political scientist Jose V. Abueva, also of the UP, conducted a Manila poll that predicted Marcos as the winner in the 1965 elections. The media did some polling as well. In the 1969 race, for example, Weekly Graphic magazine undertook a readers’ poll that saw Marcos leading his opponent Sergio Osmeña Jr.