Decision 2025: issues to watch
With two weeks of campaigning left before the Nov. 27 general elections, several circulating issues may have a small but decisive impact on the outcome. Most voters have already decided how they will vote. The housing issue with the Gonsalves family, Eloise Gonsalves’ disastrous social media defence of her family’s luxurious lifestyle, the attempt to knock off the opposition leader and the ULP’s high spending are issues to watch.
Lee Atwater, the conservative political consultant, said, “Facts are facts, but perception is reality.” Plain Talk endorses this view of life. Here’s why. Last August, an enterprising individual writing under the pen name statistician predicted that the ULP would retain government by a slim 8-7 margin, but with its winning candidates limping to victory with margins ranging between 50 to 150.
The statistician concluded that the ULP will retain all of the constituencies it held in the last Parliament, minus North Leeward. Across the political divide, observers have long concluded that it will take a political miracle for Carlos James to retain the seat.
In August, the electoral machinery of the ULP had not yet gone into high gear, as it is now.
Following the statistician’s piece, Plain Talk counters with a piece entitled “Checking the statistician’s stats.” The ruling elite scoffed at it. Here’s an excerpt:
“While a ULP victory is possible, it is highly improbable. The party will lose the next election for the following reasons:
- COVID vaccine mandate: ULP’s ticking time bomb will cause a massive explosion on polling day. An untold number of persons are eagerly waiting to offer their verdict on the ULP’s unnecessary, reckless and wicked vaccine policy that caused incalculable pain and suffering across the land. Hundreds lost their jobs and livelihoods. Lives were snuffed out. Other persons were maimed, injured and continue to suffer. The party cannot live down that evil.
- Beautification of NDP electoral slate: In the electoral beauty contest, the recruitment of Dr. Kishore Shallow, Conroy Huggins, Shaka Cupid, Phillip Jackson and Andrew John has made the NDP slate far more attractive.
- ULP’s nostalgia campaign is stale and destined to fail. With unemployment, underemployment, poverty, arrogance, waste of the public purse, excessive borrowing, lack of accountability and transparency and official corruption, fewer and fewer people will vote for the party because it built the Rabacca bridge, the Argyle airport, or made heavy investment in education.
- Citizens are worse off today than they were in 2020. Gonsalves, notorious for mendacity, doesn’t dare tell voters that their lives are better off today than yesterday, last year, or 2020, when citizens last went to the polls. The inability to persuade citizens that their lives have improved makes a 6th term for ULP a very hard sell.
- Swing. There was a 5% swing away from the ULP in 2020. I boldly predict a further swing of between 4 and 7% at the next election. As the ULP goes for a sixth consecutive term, buyers’ remorse is now entrenched. As we saw in the statistician’s analysis, the ULP got just a few new voters in the 2020 election compared to the 2015 poll. It’s doubtful that newer, younger voters, all of whom came of age and lived through the ramshackle state of our country, will gravitate to the governing party.
- Money factor. ULP’s only possible saving grace is money. Gonsalves’ family business is so poor that its only asset is money. The party has no developmental narrative except for mortgaging our future to their foreign friends. The hullabaloo about the new Kingstown port has all but disappeared as the leakage of the sand poses a nightmarish dilemma for the governing elite.
“Rhetoric aside, ULP has only one impregnable seat. It can only limp home to another term. NDP is about to romp home to victory.”
That was August. What obtains now?
The recent poll, which gives the ULP a 2-percentage-point advantage, fortifies this analysis. A 2% advantage means that the electoral race is a statistical dead heat at a time when the ULP is now in full battle cry. The leadership is clearly nervous. Its utterances, primarily those of its leader, are irresponsible, bellicose and reflect distinct signs of desperation. In absolute terms, the poll means the ULP has not made any significant gains.
Apart, there are other problems with the recent poll. It is doubtful that the pollster surveyed 2,402 persons as he claimed on The Narrative with Grenadian journalist Calistra Farrier. One does not need a poll to know that the NDP holds sway over the urban centres or that ULP is stronger in poorer rural areas, but narrowly.
A significant finding in the recent poll is that the NDP controls a majority of the country’s youth. No surprise there. If this finding is manifested on election day, ULP is a goner. SVG has a youthful population, and young people (18 to 40) make up the largest voting bloc.
The battle over the next two weeks is for the independent thinking but highly influential sliver of voters. Several essential things concern them: ULP’s long tenure with no visible signs of fundamental change in the lives of the majority. Many frown on the ULP’s bombastic clamour for a sixth term. Even more are perturbed and perplexed by the revelation that the Gonsalves family dropped close to TT$5 million in housing investments in 2018. Inquiring minds: Where are all these millions coming from? Remember, 4 out of every 10 Vincentians live in poverty,
Blaming politics rather than the family’s extravagant opulence, Gonsalves pulled out his wife, Elouise, from her dignified silence to level an unfounded and malicious charge that the “wicked NDP” was responsible for the exposure. Cloaked in victimhood, she should gain nothing but disdain. It was Anil Roberts, a Trinidad government minister, who spilt the hot beans on Storm, Eloise and Soleil, who have conveniently wrapped themselves in the Trinidad flag.
We said in August that, without a convincing narrative about where our country is going, the ULP will rely heavily on money. Would it be enough? We doubt.
