MANILA, Philippines - The disqualification cases against Sen. Grace Poe may have taken their toll on the senator’s presidential candidacy, as Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte has overtaken her in a recent popularity survey launched by a group allied with her.
In a survey by the Magdalo group, Duterte scored 31.9 percent while Poe got 26 percent. Poe had consistently topped previous surveys of presidential candidates.
Magdalo party-list Rep. Francisco Ashley Acedillo attributed the slide in Poe’s numbers to her recent disqualification from the presidential race by the Commission on Elections First and Second Divisions over her citizenship and residency status.
Poe’s camp is appealing the rulings before the Supreme Court.
“One of the observations during the survey is that a significant number of respondents presumed that Senator Poe was already disqualified from running for president, or were asking if she was already disqualified. Since our researchers are not allowed to engage with the respondents to avoid influencing their answers, this issue was not clarified to them,” Acedillo said.
Magdalo, which has Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV as its vice-presidential candidate, is supporting Poe’s presidential bid.
The survey was conducted last Dec. 9-11 shortly after Duterte declared that he was running for president, substituting for Martin Diño as standard bearer of PDP-Laban.
In the survey, the respondents were given a list of known candidates for president/vice president, and asked: “If elections would be held today, who among the following candidates would you vote for?”
Vice President Jejomar Binay ranked third with 23.6 percent; former interior secretary Manuel Roxas II with 13.5 percent, Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago, four percent; and former ambassador Roy Señeres, 0.1 percent.
“We expect that these figures and the candidates’ rankings will continue to notably change, especially when the Comelec en banc and the Supreme Court, eventually, will release their decision on Senator Poe’s and Mayor Duterte’s candidacies,” Acedillo pointed out.
Among the vice presidential candidates, Sen. Francis Escudero remained the frontrunner in the Magdalo survey with 28.8 percent, followed by Sen. Ferdinand Marcos Jr. with 22.3 percent.
The Magdalo group said the numbers of both Escudero and Marcos declined compared to the October survey result.
Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano was the biggest gainer in the latest Magdalo survey of vice presidential candidates with 16.6 percent, from only 11 percent in October.
In fourth place was Rep. Leni Robredo with 11.7 percent, followed by Trillanes with 10.6 percent and Sen. Gregorio Honasan with eight percent.
The survey had almost 3,000 respondents across the country, with a margin of error of 1.8 percent.
UST students for Miriam
While trailing in recent surveys, Santiago has emerged as the top choice for president among University of Santo Tomas (UST) students based on a survey by the The Varsitarian, the university’s official student publication.
In the Varsitarian survey, two of every three (66 percent) of the 1,366 respondents said they would choose Santiago if the elections were held on the day they were polled. The survey was conducted from Oct. 26 to Dec. 10.
No other candidate got two-digit scores in the survey.