Estimating the South African Election Result

This report estimates the May 29 South African general election results. It does so via inferring from the Foundation's tracking poll the trajectory of each key political party in the week ahead of the election and applying to that trajectory the margin of error of the poll plus an additional 1 percentage point (the extra point is to account for the continuing volatility we see in the most recent political data). In the charts below three lines are produced for each political party. The blue line is the figure towards which that party was tracking in the final week ahead of the election. The black line is the likely upper extreme towards which the party was tracking once the poll's margin of error was applied. The orange line is the likely lower extreme towards which the party was tracking once the poll's margin of error was applied (on the 58% and 60% turnout model charts for the ANC and the DA you will see a fourth, green line which is the projection of the final result that the Foundation developed after voting concluded). Be warned that in the final days before an election it may be customary to see tracking poll lines flatten as political opinion crystalizes. This has not happened in the case of this election for the reason that ANC voter opinion is so fractured on the fringes of that party that a share of voters continue to ping pong between the ANC and the EFF, MK and the DA in the main. This fractured ANC support has been a key insight generated by the tracking poll but necessarily diminishes the predictive qualities of the poll. At the Foundation we continue to see the media misreporting polling as forecasting. We must stress that in this election particularly significant swings in voter sentiment, even beyond the margins of error, will make it very difficult for any entity to call the result with precision.