December 22, (THEWILL) – Ahead of the forthcoming 2023 Presidential elections, a nationwide opinion poll has again put Peter Obi, Presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP), ahead of other candidates contesting the presidential election.
The new poll commissioned by ANAP Foundation and conducted by NOI Polls Limited in December 2022, put Obi ahead of three other frontline candidates with a 23% positive response for the LP candidate, an improvement on the 21% Obi recorded when the poll was first conducted in September.
The report of the new poll which was released on Wednesday, put the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his counterparts in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar and Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP), in second, third and fourth positions, respectively.
President of ANAP Foundation, Atedo Peterside, said the election has moved past a three-horse race, as was the case in an earlier poll released in September, to a four-horse race, although Kwankwaso who had just 3% of the votes in the first poll dropped to 2% in the new poll.
While Tinubu retained 13% of the votes as recorded in the previous poll, Atiku’s votes dropped to 10%. Undecided voters accounted for the remaining 51%.
“Nobody has gained or lost more than 2, 3 percent. I don’t know whether that is good news or bad news, but it is as if nothing has happened fundamentally, no significant shift”, he said.
According to the report, “When asked if religion would affect the choice of respondents, data gathered showed that 15% of the respondents replied in the affirmative to religion influencing their choice of candidates, but 81% on the other hand, responded that their choices were not being influenced by religion.
“In the same vein, 10% responded in the affirmative to ethnicity affecting their choice of candidates while 86% responded that their choices were not influenced by ethnicity.
“71% of the respondents think the Presidential candidates should compulsorily participate in a televised debate and/or town hall meeting, with the debates/town hall meetings spanning across topics like their manifestos, competence checks, and personality recognition amongst others.”
