John Mahama (NDC) is leading, but likely a second round will be necessary
In the period September-November Afroopinion conducted a survey using randomly generated Whatsapp numbers. The mean idea behind this so-called WANGI methodology is that it is impossible to be influenced by national governments or other actors. Since there is a direct interaction between a surveyor from outside of Ghana with a voter from Ghana, there is no way of them knowing that a Ghanian voter is participating and hence it’s also not possible for them to interfere. The main candidates are below.
Even under these circumstances, respondents are reluctant to give their opinion. Only 48.6% of the respondents that we asked “Can it be dangerous if a stranger asks you such political questions” replied with no. Only 39.2% answered “yes”, while 12.2% even refused to answer.
It should be noted that this distrust is still lower than in countries with regimes that are generally considered authoritarian like Uganda (2021) and Zimbabwe (2023), where we did earlier surveys.
The present President is Nana Akufo-Addo, who won the 2020 elections with 51.3% of the votes.
We asked our respondents who were old enough who they voted for in 2020, and they replied
Since the size of our survey is relatively small (we talked to 500 respondents, where 2000 is normal) the 95% error bound is relative large at 9%. This fact, in combination that voters have passed away can explain the difference of 10%. This seems to suggest that Nana Akufo-Addo honestly won the previous elections although not all of our respondents agree on that.
We asked our respondent how Akufo-Addo performed and the responses were mixed.
However, Akufo-Addo is not running, but Mahamudu Bawumia is representing NPP. John Mahama remains the NDC candidate.
According to our predictions, he is leading with 48.5%. But since the 95% error is 8%, we are not sure if he will win in the first round. The considerable amount of voters for Nana Kwame, 12.1% makes it more difficult for either Mahama or Bawumia to win the election with one round only.
Our survey indicates that Ashanti is a stronghold for Bawumia and Great-Accra is a stronghold for Mahama. However, it should worry Bawumia that he scores less in these areas than Nana Akufo-Addo did.