State leadership candidates pair of Prabowo Subianto-Gibran Rakabuming Raka continues to lead the poll after the third presidential debate on Sunday. A survey by Indonesia Political Opinion (IPO) from January 1-7, 2024 found that 42.3 percent of the respondents will vote for Prabowo-Gibran, while 34.5 percent of them will vote for Anies Baswedan-Muhaimin Iskandar and another 21.5 percent will vote for Ganjar Pranowo-Mahfud MD.
“Names of the vice presidential candidates also affect the electability of presidential candidates. Muhaimin Iskandar increases Anies’s electability by 2.4 percent, Gibran adds to Prabowo’s electability by 0.8 percent, while Mahfud MD, on the contrary, decreases Ganjar’s electability quite sharply by 3.4 percent,” Dedi Kurnia Syah, Executive Director of Indonesia Political Opinion, said in a media conference while presenting results of the IPO survey on Wednesday.
The survey used Multistage Randpom Sampling, with margin of error (MoE) of 2.50 percent, with data accuracy rate of 95 percent. This survey took samples of 1,200 respondents that were spread proportionally in all provinces in Indonesia.
Dedi said that since the previous IPO survey in November 2023, only Ganjar-Mahfud that experienced a steady decline, while Gibran, who originally absorbed 1.8 percent of Prabowo’s electability, has now started to provide leverage of 0.8 percent.
In general, the public uses more emotional reasons as their consideration for voting. A review into a candidate’s ability to lead the country gets the largest portion of people of 61.5 percent, followed by people who want to see change at 57 percent. The two considerations are in sharp contrast to the candidate’s choice of campaign theme of a continuation of Jokowi’s program which was only 22.5 percent. Meanwhile, unfavorable themes, like religion, was only 8.4 percent.
Debate
Gaib Maruto Sigit, Editor in Chief of MNC Network said the impact of the presidential debate to the voters at the grass root level is unknown. Campaign teams use topics of the debates for their social media campaign.”However presidential debate is still needed because Indonesia is a democracy. The public will know what a candidate delivers through debate,” Gaib said.
Other than that, the Indonesian public still pays attention on the performance of the candidates rather than the substance of the debates. This phenomena is in line with the findings by the Indonesia Political Opinion.
Dedi said of the total respondents who watched the presidential and vice presidential debates, either whole, partially or through snippets in social media platforms, which are amounted to 72 percent of the respondents, stated that the main factor for candidates to be considered as convincing following their performance in the debate was as much as 48.1 percent, then the candidates’ clear delivery of their vision and mission statements 37 percent.
Issues of personal characteristic that are not largely used as a reference for assessment, namely politeness at 8.5 percent, firmness and authority at only 4.0 percent.
In terms of ideas, the public rated Prabowo’s ideas were the best at 33.5 percent, followed by Anies at 28.1 percent, and Ganjar Pranowo 27.9 percent, while 10.5 percent did not rate.
