New Survey Confirms Buhari on Track to Win Presidential Elections by Heavy Margins 2Days To Election

Abraham - March 27, 2015

The new survey was conducted from March 14th to March 25th. The Survey Platform utilized was Survey MonkeyTM By SHR. A detailed overview of the survey methodology is described at the end of this paper. The survey questionnaire comprised of 42 questions covering the following topics: (a) demographic questions covering gender, educational attainment, income, region of origin, place of domicile and location at which voter’s registration was done (b) 2011 electoral choices (c) 2015 voting intent (d) respondents’ political views and (e) motivating factors for the choice of Presidential candidate.

Projected Outcomes
The survey emphatically confirmed that Muhammadu Buhari is on track to win the 2015 Presidential elections with about 32.3 million total votes (see Figure 1), while Goodluck Jonathan will obtain about 7.7 million votes. The combined tally for the two candidates will average about 40 million votes. We have maintained our assumption that the voter turnout will be about 58.1%, which is the average of the voter turnout percentages obtained in the last 4 elections held in the 4th republic (53.7% in 2011, 57.5% in 2007, 69.1% in 2003 and 52.3% in 1999).

Based on the survey results, Sahara reporters predict that Goodluck Jonathan is unlikely to win outright in any geo-political zone. While they reported in their last survey that Jonathan would win the South East (65%) and South South (71%) geo-political zones, the new survey results indicate that he will likely lose to Buhari in the two regions winning only about 42% of the votes in the South East and 38% in his own region, the South South. We project that Muhammadu Buhari is on track to win in the North East (83% of the votes, confidence interval 95±12%), North West (95% of the votes, confidence interval 95±8%), North Central (82% of the votes, confidence interval 95±6%), South West (86% of the votes, confidence interval 95±5%), South East (58% of the votes, confidence interval 95±15%) and South South (62% of the votes, confidence interval 95±9%).