Renowned Ghanaian journalist, pollster and Managing Editor of the Daily Dispatch newspaper, Ben Ephson, has explained why his prediction for the 2024 general elections failed.
Known for his polling, he has consistently gotten all his political predictions correctly up until the 2016 election, and now the just-ended 2024 elections.
Mr Epson projected a win for the NDC in 2016, which failed. Similarly, his forecast for the 2024 polls in favour of the New Patriotic Party also did not come to fruition.
Speaking on Joy Prime’s Prime Morning show after the election, the pollster explained that the NPP executives and members failed to turn out for their party.
This, according to him, was due to apathy and cannot be detected before any election is conducted.
“Over the past 23 years, I’ve done 8 polls; I’ve missed 2. Now, on both occasions, like this one, for example, it is difficult to know apathy. If you look at 2020 and 2024, the numbers that the NDC got were about the same. NPP’s numbers dropped by about 30%.”
Using the Ashanti Region, which is considered the NPP stronghold, he highlighted that “the votes that the NPP got in 2020 dropped by over 1.2 million in 2024 in Ashanti alone. So that is the problem with polling. It’s difficult to indicate apathy. It was the same thing in 2016.”
During the United States 2016 presidential elections, the Democrat party candidate and former First Lady Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, invalidating predictions by some pollsters in the US and elsewhere.
Comparing that to Ghana’s polls, Ben Ephson believes that the forecast failed because the majority of blacks did not turn out to vote for Hillary Clinton.
“When she [Hillary Clinton] was campaigning with Obama for a Democrat slot, she took potshots at the Blacks. So when she became a Democrat candidate, they refused to turn out. So that’s one of the problems with polling. You cannot indicate apathy that people will not turn out.
He reiterated that if the remaining 30% of the NPP turned out to cast their ballots for the party, Dr Bawumia would have emerged victorious because he thinks the NDC victory numbers were similar to the previous elections.
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