Unintended

There is an old Persian saying: The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The LP’s intentions might be anything but good. They lead to hell nevertheless.

If it is true the ruling party is behind the well-orchestrated effort to eliminate rivals to its standard-bearer, it could produce disaster instead of victory for Mar Roxas.

This effort at virtual assassination of political rivals obviously intends to clear the way for a Roxas win (by default, if it comes to that). The strategists of this foul effort, however, might be proceeding from wrong assumptions. The most erroneous of those assumptions is to think that if, for instance, Grace Poe is taken out of the game by means of disqualification, her erstwhile voters will flock to the side of Roxas.

Early evidence suggests the contrary. After Poe was hounded with disqualification cases, the political stock of Rodrigo Duterte zoomed.

What the early evidence tells us is that it might be more suitable to divide our voters into only two general dispositions: the pro-administration voters and the anti-administration voters. The pro-administration voters support Roxas, who not only presents himself as the clone of the sitting president but praised that president as the best one we ever had. The anti-administration voters are distributed among the other candidates.

This means that if any of the other candidates (Binay, Poe, Duterte and Santiago) are elbowed out of the race, their potential voters are more likely to migrate to another anti-administration candidate, not to Roxas. This explains why, even as the voter preference shares of Duterte and Poe might fluctuate, Roxas remains securely at the bottom.

Whether by some sinister political design or not, two divisions of the Comelec have ruled to disqualify Grace Poe. It now seems unlikely the Comelec en banc will save her. She will have to seek relief from the Supreme Court, which will involve a long and tedious process sure to derail her campaign.

The early tracking polls show that voters fleeing the beleaguered Poe campaign are migrating to the Duterte side. The Davao mayor’s rapid rise and the steady erosion of support for Roxas is obviously the reason the LP presidential candidate trained his guns on Duterte.

Roxas’ early attempt to discredit Duterte by citing some questionable stats on the Davao crime rate backfired badly. The two men both threatened to slap the other. Last heard, Roxas was daring Duterte to a fistfight. Duterte escalated the verbal tussle by challenging Roxas to a duel.

If that duel does not materialize, there is yet another way for the LP to knock out Duterte from the race. They could simply work to declare his candidacy-by-substitution invalid. A petition objecting to the validity of Duterte’s substitution is ready for deliberation by the poll body.

Should the LP succeed in disqualifying both Poe and Duterte, that will not ensure a Roxas win. The greater likelihood is that this situation will guarantee a Roxas debacle.

The Poe and Duterte voters are least likely to vote pro-administration – especially if they perceive the disqualification of their favorite candidates the handiwork of the ruling party. Some might choose to boycott. The greater number will choose to shift their vote to the anti-administration candidate left standing.

That anti-administration candidate will not likely be Miriam Defensor Santiago. She is seen as too sickly to withstand the rigors of a tough presidential fight. Her campaign has been too feeble to be taken seriously.

The only viable anti-administration candidate, in the event both Poe and Duterte are knocked off the race, is Jejomar Binay.

Notwithstanding the intense smear campaign mounted against him, Binay has maintained his core base of support that ranges between 20 percent and 25% of voters. His campaign is well organized. His political network is firmly entrenched. His determination is unshakable.

While Roxas and Duterte are busy trying to slap each other, while Poe is busy fighting off disqualification and while Miriam is busy with healing herself, Binay is working up his vote. He is reaching deep into the grassroots and building alliances with the most minor local executives.

Irony of ironies, the harder the pro-administration forces work to disqualify rival candidates, the more they could end up making Binay the “super-candidate” – the one who inherits Poe’s and Duterte’s disgruntled voters.

By simply surviving the early onslaught, Binay stands to gain the most from the uncertainty cast on the other anti-administration candidates. He does not have to bother fashioning a newfangled strategy to win. All he has to do is continue working his campaign the way he always has – diligently.

After all, only two candidates in the current field have any credible record of executive ability: Binay and Duterte. If Duterte is eliminated by the LP’s campaign of political extermination, Binay will remain the best option for someone who could assemble a working government and make it run. He has the political network to do that.

Let the desperate LP strategists indulge in experimentation as they struggle to find a way to get voters interested in their stale candidate. The more they indulge, the more likelihood of backfiring there is. The more they try to reinvent their candidate, the faker he appears to be before the voters.

Through all of political history, a constant factor has bewildered political players. It is the factor of unintended consequences.

The LP-led campaign of political extermination tries to deny voters any choice by eliminating rivals. The unintended consequence is, having failed to eliminate everyone else, the LP produces the “super-candidate” who will bury the erstwhile ruling party.