2024 Sri Lankan Presidential Election
Who will be President? (Part 2)
A Three Horse Race?
This article follows from my March 2024 article with the same title. While you might find that article interesting, you won’t need to read that to make sense of this.
Latest News
As of writing, September 21 is just 52 days away, and thus far the following candidates have expressed intention to contest.
- Ranil Wickramasinghe (Independent). The UNP, the CWC, and a breakaway faction of the SLPP (with as much as 90+ MPs) have pledged support.
- Sajith Premadasa (SJB). The Up-Country People’s Front, and several smaller parties have also pledged support.
- Anura Kumara Dissanayake (NPP). The JVP have pledged support.
- Sarath Fonseka (Independent)
- Wijedasa Rajapaksa (SLFP)
- Nuwan Bopage (People’s Struggle Alliance)
- A. S. P. Liyanage (Sri Lanka Labour Party)
- Sarath Keerthiratna (Independent)
- Janaka Ratnayake (Independent).
- Oshala Herath (New Independent Front)
While technically, we have 10 candidates, particularly given the SLPP support for Ranil Wickramasinghe, the race is increasingly looking like a Three-Horse Race.
We have the “3-Way: Government vs. Opposition” configuration that I described in the previous article.
The “Data”
As I’ve said before, we have precious little credible public polling data on politics in general, and the 2024 Presidential Election in particular.
An exception is the Presidential Election Voting Intention poll, published by the Insititute of Health Policy (IHP).
There latest poll, for May 2024, put Anura Kumara Dissanayaka (AKD) and Sajith Premadasa (SP) neck and neck, with Ranil Wickramasinghe (RW) and a Generic SLPP candidate straggling behind.
However, if we assuming 1) that most SLPP support will flow to RW, 2) the error margin of this poll is much larger than claimed (say 20%), and 3) that quite a lot has changed since May 2024, and more might change by September, we get a much closer race.
Both AKD and SP have a reasonable chance of passing the 50% limit, and thus of winning the election on 1st preference votes.
While RWs, odds are longer, he has a reasonable chance of not only forcing a 2nd/3rd preference count, but also ending up with more 1st preference votes than either SP or AKD.
These observations have some interesting implications.
Plan A — Winning on 1st Preferences
As we shall discuss, 2nd/3rd preferences can be messy. And so all three candidates would be looking to maximize their chances of passing the 50% mark outright.
At the same time, they would be looking to minimize the other two candidates' chances of doing the same.
For me (personally, and you might disagree), each candidate has a principal weakness, and the other candidates will go after that.
- AKD — Association with the JVP Inserection, and the JVPs Communist Ideology
- SP —Reputation as incompetent tawkers, and blunderers from the Yahapaalanaya Experiment.
- RW — Cuddling up to the SLPP in general, and the Rajapaksa’s in particularly, while blind-eying their many evils.
No candidate is guaranteed of passing the 50% mark, and so they all need a Plan B as backup.
Plan B —Winning 2nd and 3rd Preferences
In all eight Presidential Elections that we’ve had thus far, the winning candidate has always passed the 50% limit on 1st preference votes. The closest we came to counting 2nd/3rd preferences was in 2005, when Mahinda Rajapaksa squeezed passed RW with 50.29% of valid 1st preference votes, or a mere 28,632 votes above the 4,858,520 required to win.
If the data is anything to go by, 2024 might be different.
As far as I know, the candidates and their political parties have been silent about 2nd/3rd preferences. For example, no candidate has asked another’s supporters to give him their 2nd preference vote, nor vice versa.
No 2nd and 3rd Preferences?
Nor is there any credible data on how people will exercise their 2nd/3rd preference. More than one preference is not compulsory, and so it is possible that many voters will indicate no preference beyond their first.
If most voters refrain from 2nd and 3rd Preferences voting, whoever with the most 1st preferences would win, even if they don’t hit 50%. As things stand, AKD and SP have more to gain from such behaviour, while RW has the most to lose.
Encouraging 2nd and 3rd Preferences
As we have no precedent, it is unclear how RW or any other candidate might canvass voters for their 2nd preference. Considering our political culture, “asking” might be counterproductive: Why ask for a 2nd preference, when you can ask for a 1st?
That said we might see the following strategies, of collecting 2nd/3rd preference votes:
- Partial Negative Campaigning. Candidate A might push a negative campaign against Candidate B but not Candidate C, to get Candidate C’s supporters’ 2nd preference votes.
- Broadening Appeal. We might see candidates suddenly going after voters outside their natural voter base.
- Last Minute Alliances. We might see some variations on the “Hopper Party” — theme.
Concluding Warnings
As with the previous article, much of this article is founded on strong opinion and speculation, and weak data. And so, please take it with the mandatory pinch of Sodium Chloride.
As I said earlier, speculation can be entertaining. But often, even usually, wrong. So please be patient and stay tuned for something more statistically and otherwise significant.
