Three independent analysts predict a 51% win for Raila Odinga in the 2022 elections

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2022 Elections

Kenya’s 2022 elections is 6 days away. As the election date draws near, the majority of people become anxious as to who will emerge victorious, particularly in the presidential election. This can be attested by the recent trends on Twitter where pollsters including TIFA, Infotrak, Mizani and others have trended after releasing their last opinion polls regarding the 2022 elections. Other than Mizani, Radio Africa and IRS that have recently put Ruto in the lead by 50.6% against Raila at 45.3%, 45% against Raila at 44%, and 53.1% against Raila at 42.7% respectively, the other pollsters namely Infotrak, Ipsos, TIFA, and CAP have put Raila in the lead at 49% against Ruto at 41%, 47% against Ruto at 41%, 46.7% against Ruto at 44.4%, and 52% against Ruto at 45% respectively.

Three independent analysts that is Mutahi Ngunyi, Kennedy Kachwanya and Odipo Riaga have used insights from these pollsters and past elections to arrive at the conclusion that Raila Odinga will emerge the winner of this 2022 election with 51% of the vote; despite using totally different approaches.

The approach used by Mutahi Ngunyi was to first assume that the voter turnout for the 2022 general election will be 71%. With this assumption, the number of votes that will be cast in the presidential ballot will turn out to be 15.6 million. From this 15.6 million votes, Mutahi went ahead to assume that Raila’s core base of 44% given his previous performance in 2007, 2013 and 2017 will give him an assured 6.9 million votes.

The next assumption was to factor in the fact that in this election, Mt. Kenya does not have a presidential candidate hence they will have to split their votes between the two leading contenders. According to Mutahi Ngunyi, in the past, whenever Mt. Kenya is faced with the possibility of splitting their votes, they have always split it at 66% for one candidate and 33% for the other candidate. In 2022, therefore, the most likely scenario is that Mt. Kenya will vote for Ruto at 66% and for Raila at 33%. The 1% difference will be given to the other candidates. Thus, Raila’s votes from Mt. Kenya will be 1.4 million votes. Adding this to Raila’s assured votes of 44% gives him 8.3 million votes. However, some of Raila’s assured votes of 6.9 million is about 300,000, hence when this is subtracted from the 8.3 million, Raila is left with 8 million votes, which works out to be 51.3% of the 15.6 million voters that will cast their votes for the presidential votes.

The approach by Kennedy Kachwanya was to consider the turnout and voting patterns for the 2013 general elections. Kachwanya considered the patterns of the 2013 general elections for two reasons; first was the fact that 2013 was a transitional election similar to what we currently face, and secondly was the fact that the 2017 election was nullified due to irregularities and illegalities of the electoral process, hence the voting pattern in 2017 cannot be trusted. The other factors that Kachwanya considered included the political realignments that include President Uhuru’s support for Raila Odinga, Mudavidi’s and Wetangula’s support for William Ruto, the choice of Gachagua and Martha Karua as Ruto’s and Raila’s running mates respectively, and a host of other factors including the numbers from opinion polls. After these considerations, Kennedy Kachwanya arrived at the figures shown in the Table below.

According to Kachwanya’s prediction shown in the above table, Raila will garner 52.4% of the vote, whereas Ruto will garner 45% of the vote. This prediction agrees with the poll by the Centre for African Progress (CAP) which had 52% of the respondents state that they will vote for Raila as 45% of the respondents state that they will vote for Ruto.

The last prediction is by Odipo Riaga (author of this article) who considered 2017 turnout and voting patterns together with the new political alignments and opinion polls to arrive at the figures shown in the table below.

According to Odipo’s prediction, Raila will garner 50.8% of the vote against Ruto’s 45.6% of the vote. This prediction is close to Mutahi’s prediction except for the turnout which is predicted to be 76.7% as compared to Mutahi’s prediction of 71%.

Given the above prediction and the numbers from opinion polls that have hardly indicated an above 50% +1 for any candidate, there is a likelihood of a run-off and the possibility of Ruto winning isn’t ruled out either. The conclusion from these predictions is thus the biggest factor that will determine the winner is voter mobilization, where the candidate with the highest voter turnout is very likely going to carry the day. It is worth noting that the 8 million votes, 8.9 million votes, and 8.6 million votes that Mutahi Ngunyi, Kennedy Kachwanya and Odipo Riaga have predicted respectively for Raila Odinga are close to the 8.5 million votes Azimio has been touting as the number of votes Raila will get in 2022 election in the recent campaign rallies.

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