Bhumjaithai's Warning Signs

Some updates from new polling

Anutin Charnvirakul greets Thanathorn Juangroongrueangkit on the campaign trail. Image credits: Bhumjaithai Party Facebook page

In late December, I wrote a piece on how Bhumjaithai was able to position themselves as the early frontrunner in this election. Over a month since then, and with less than two weeks to go before February 8th, I think we have enough data to be able to pinpoint how warning signs have emerged that could heavily complicate Bhumjaithai’s ability to be in a position to lead the next government.

Thoughts on seat forecasts

First, a few words on the current seat forecasts.

Since I wrote my piece, the expert opinion has largely coalesced around predicting that Bhumjaithai would indeed win the most seats. (I want to note that the piece was written before most of these expert predictions, lest I be accused of following the herd!) Bhumjaithai is usually projected to win around 140-150 seats. The People’s Party is typically predicted to win around 120-130 seats, while Pheu Thai would win anything between 80-120 seats.

As BYU Professor Joel Selway has argued in this piece on Thai Data Points, however, these expert predictions are contradicted by the polling, and using what he calls the “party transfer method”¹ would actually point to the People’s Party winning 236 seats and Bhumjaithai winning 145 seats, and Pheu Thai winning as few as 45 seats. Of course, this is not in itself a seat forecast, either. As I always say in post after post, the polling largely captures the party-list result but not the constituency result, and as Professor Selway notes, “parties with strong local organization can outperform their national polling, while parties with broad but shallow support can struggle to convert votes into seats.”

As a result, it is virtually impossible to be confident about seat forecasts unless you are polling in every constituency and you know enough about the dynamics of individual constituencies to be able to predict whether a candidate is sufficiently formidable locally to overcome bad party polling. This is why I wrote in my midway vibe check that there is good reason to believe Bhumjaithai to be competitive in ~130 constituencies while also winning perhaps 20 party list seats based on the national polling. I did not, however, make a forecast because I do not have enough information about all the individual seat dynamics — something that is unavailable to virtually anyone without access to detailed internal party polling. In other words: if someone gets their seat forecast right, I think they basically made a lucky guess!

National vs local is the defining question

Expert forecasts tend to place a lot of emphasis on local candidate strength, while a strictly polling-based forecast would largely take into account the national sentiment. The fundamental question we have at this juncture in the campaign, therefore, is whether the national or the local will take precedence in this election.

This question is important because it determines how much ballot splitting we might see. Last week, I wrote about this in the case of the South, where the Democrats are surging. Another NIDA poll that was released yesterday showed that the Democrats were now polling at over 50 percent in the major Southern province of Nakhon Sri Thammarat, far ahead of Bhumjaithai at around 17 percent.

If that is true, it would not be inconceivable that we start seeing Democrat upsets of both Bhumjaithai and Kla Tham in more rural constituencies. (For context, the Democrats won around 22 percent of the constituency vote and a mere 8 percent of the party-list vote in 2023, when they won 6 of 10 seats). A local poll of all seven constituencies in Songkhla conducted by Songkhla Ratchaphat University revealed that the Democrats could indeed be on the verge of a few unexpected victories. As I said last week, if the Democrats manage to make a dent in Bhumjaithai’s expected Southern gains, that could seriously hamper the party’s national goals.

The Southern Electoral Battleground

Nationally, the NIDA polling has revealed that the People’s Party is gaining momentum after a slow start to the campaign. I noted in my midway point analysis that the PP was rising in the polls, although it was still registering below its 2023 performance. We have two interesting local clues, however. The PP polled at around 37 percent in NIDA’s Chiang Mai poll, and then at around 42 percent in their Samut Prakan Poll. Both results are only a few percentage points away from how Move Forward performed in both provinces respectively. All of this polling has come before Pita Limjaroenrat’s return to the campaign trail, which may help move the needle further towards the PP’s favor.

All of this paints a similar picture: the parties that are riding national waves of support (the PP and the Democrats) are surging in the polls, while Bhumjaithai’s gains are more limited. Perhaps the party is trying to respond to this vibe shift. It is wheeling out its more popular figures like Supajee Suthumpun and Ekniti Nitithanpraphas to more campaign events. It has also sharpened its rhetoric, with deputy leader Phiphat Ratchakitprakarn arguing that people should vote for “parties that love the country” and refrain from supporting “parties that don’t love the country.”

Ultimately, what we are seeing is the most unpredictable election in years. We just do not know at this juncture whether it’s more likely for national sentiment to beat out local attachments, or vice versa. After all, there’s no scientific way to pin down the tipping point where a party polls well enough to float all its boats in the constituencies. What we do know is that there are some warning signs for Bhumjaithai, and the party may not have the glide path to leading the next government that was predicted at the start.

At the same time, however, if the polls are overstating the PP and the Democrats’ support, Bhumjaithai could indeed still be on a glide path back to Government House. Polls, after all, are not a guarantee that respondents will turn out, and if PP enthusiasm proves to be a mirage, parties like Bhumjaithai and Pheu Thai could indeed be in the beneficiaries in the final vote share.

Addendum: internal polling

Just for fun, here’s a roundup of seat goals and internal polling that different party leaders have put out recently.

• The PP secretary-general, Sarayut Jailak, says that if the party fails to win at least 200 seats he will resign.

• Anutin argues that 150 seats is “too few” for Bhumjaithai, and a ThaiPBS article said Bhumjaithai sources are projecting 180 seats.

• Yodchanan Wongsawat says that Pheu Thai’s internal polls suggest the party could win 150-200 seats.

• Abhisit Vejjajiva said that the Democrats’ internal polling suggested the party could be on track to win up to 40-50 seats if all goes well.

Of course, it’s not all possible for all of these internal polls to be correct, because then we would have to expand parliament beyond the current 500 seats! But perhaps it’s a reminder that no party — especially not the top three — can be completely counted out yet. No public poll has indicated that Pheu Thai, for example, is on track to win anything close to 200 seats, but the party seems to be projecting genuine confidence. Only less than two weeks to go before we find out which party does the best polling.

1. In his words, instead of applying a uniform swing, this approach takes into account: “1. Constituency-level vote shares from the previous election. 2. National polling data indicating which parties are gaining and losing support. 3. Assumptions about the direction of voter transfers from declining parties to rising ones.”