Invoke: Redelineation will not affect PH’s Malay support in Selangor

Many things are different now and need to be taken into consideration. Pakatan Rakyat is no more, Mahathir is with the opposition and PAS is the third force, says Rafizi

Rafizi Ramli says the survey shows that support from non-Malays looked set to remain solely with the opposition.

SERDANG: Pandan MP Rafizi Ramli said the latest survey done by Invoke, his policy research outfit, found Malay support for Pakatan Harapan would not be affected by the recent redelineation exercise, passed by Parliament.

He also claimed three-cornered fights for the Malay vote would not favour Barisan Nasional as they would have to split their usual 60% Malay votes into two.

“Many analysts have used GE13 numbers to come up with figures that show BN would benefit from three-cornered fights.

“This is wrong as we know the dynamics have drastically changed since GE13.

“Many things are different now and need to be taken into consideration.

“Pakatan Rakyat is no more, Dr Mahathir Mohamad is with the opposition and PAS is the third force,” he said.

Invoke’s telephone survey conducted this month found that in Selangor, 27.6% of the respondents (Malay voters) chose Barisan Nasional, 20.5% PH and 8.5% PAS.

Another 25.2% did not want to answer while 18% were unsure.

He said the difference in the survey between BN and PH was only 7.1%.

“It’s quite obvious the Malay support for PH is still quite strong. Together with the strong support from non-Malays, these seats should stay with PH.

“Our profiling questions narrowed down the undecided voters to pick one party — PH, PAS or BN. Most of them were leaning towards PH and are against Najib Razak remaining as prime minister.

“After these further profiling questions were posed, BN secured 37.6% of the support, PH 43.7% and PAS 18.7%,” he said during a forum on the effects of the Election Commission’s redelineation on GE14.

The new electoral boundaries have already been gazetted for use during GE14 after being passed by the Dewan Rakyat.

Rafizi said the redelineation will not swing the Malay-majority seats to BN but only reduce the margin won by PH.

“PH will still command a very comfortable margin in these seats.”

Rafizi said the survey showed that support from non-Malays looked set to remain solely with the opposition.

“The survey found that Chinese support for BN was just 5.5%, for PH 61.3% and for PAS zero.

“Among Indians, BN has 19.4% support, PH has 42% support and PAS 0.3%.

“This is why the turnout rate is important because we know the Chinese votes are with PH while the Indian votes for PH in Selangor will be 10% above national average.”

Rafizi added the delineation will result in only a handful of seats adding more than 1% of Malay votes.

“We also need to take into account that the percentage of new Chinese voters is higher than new Malay voters.

“These new voters will dilute the effect of this redelineation. This is something the government can’t control by redrawing the boundaries.” -FMT