April 17, 2007 - Party-list candidates CIBAC and Yacap posted significant gains in the latest survey conducted nationwide by Proberz Consultancy from April 7 to 11.  

CIBAC improved from 0.4 percent in January to 2.1 percent in April or a gain of +1.7 percent while Yacap benchmarked at 0.5 percent and improved to 2.3 percent or a gain of +1.8 percent also in the same period.

This was revealed by Prof. Alfred Soreta, political science professor and executive director of Proberz Consultancy, a polling firm that predicted fairly and accurately the outcome of the 2004 presidential election in an exit poll. 

“This latest Proberz test-run of PL candidates was conducted along the so-called Lingayen-Lucena corridor more particularly Pangasinan, Region III,NCR, Region IV, Cebu, and Davao del Sur where 46.7 percent of the total number of voters in the country are registered.  

“It could be that both CIBAC and Yacap concentrated their efforts in these areas knowing that they could deliver the 2 percent required minimum to barge into the winning column.  

“The other gainers are Abono, which posted ratings of 0.6 percent to 2.3 percent also in the same period and so with FPJMP and Apec,” Soreta explained.  The survey was topped by Bayan Muna (15.8 percent to 24.7 percent) followed by Gabriela, Anakpawis, Akbayan, Anak, among others.

Proberz said that the end-game is not yet in sight as the 45-day campaign for local candidates is only barely three weeks old.   It is expected that local candidates will serve as anchors of most national candidates such as senatorial and party-list where most of the locals are expected to carry the nationals in the sample ballots.  

“The battle for awareness is almost over and the battle over which PL to carry in the sample ballot is at hand.   Proberz expects 67 percent of registered voters in the entire country to vote for PL and this is about 28.1 million voters of which 2 percent is needed to barge into the winning column and that is about 562,000 votes, more or less,” Soreta concluded.

The Proberz test-run has a sample size of 1,200 respondents who were asked in face-to-face interviews in the aforecited sample areas. It was conducted on a confidence level of 98 percent with an error margin of 1.8 percent which means that a PL rating 2.2 percent could still go up to 4 percent or down to 0.4 percent. 

Source: Manila Standard Today