By Ong Kian Ming

COMMENT Last Sunday was an eventful day for me personally. I took part in my first 15km pacesetters run which took me through the rolling hills and grand mansions of Bukit Tunku. I dropped by a friend’s church in a refurbished part of Petaling Jaya which looked very different compared to three years ago.

I played basketball in the evening at a friend’s apartment just off Jalan Ipoh complete with its own private park. I then had dinner at a newly-opened restaurant in nearby Kepong with a few newfound friends. Finally, I returned home, fired up my computer and checked the Sibu by-election results.

It turned out that it was also an eventful day for the voters in Sibu. For the first time since the 1982 general election, the parliamentary seat of Sibu fell into the hands of the opposition, by a narrow margin of 398 votes.

Someone asked me if I was surprised by the result and I answered in the negative. After all, I had predicted that the DAP would win this seat by a margin of 500 votes.

While my prediction of a 500-vote majority was not too far off from the actual result, an analysis by polling station and stream shows that not all my pre-polling day assumptions were correct.

Firstly, I had taken a more conservative route of predicting a 68% to 69% share of the Chinese vote for DAP. Instead, the actual figure was 70%. This additional one percent or so turned out to be the deciding factor since the anticipated swing in the Iban vote did not take place.

In fact, not only did the Iban vote not swing in favour of the opposition, it actually increased in BN’s favour by approximately 2% – from 80% in 2008 to 82% in 2010. This was somewhat negated by the approximately 1% fall in the level of BN support among the Melanaus.

Furthermore, my prediction was based on BN winning a 2,500 majority among the postal votes. The actual postal vote majority for the BN was closer to 2200, probably due to the increase of spoilt postal votes from 103 votes in 2008 to 208 in 2010 and a smaller overall number of postal votes cast (3,000 votes in 2008 compared to 2,600 in 2010).

The counting of the postal ballots would have been even more controversial if the BN’s majority from these votes was sufficient to swing the seat in favour of the BN candidate.

The devil is always in the detail when it comes to evaluating the individual components on which the overall prediction is based. In this case, I was off by a little in almost all of these components but these factors cancelled each other out in such a way as to preserve the overall accuracy of the initial prediction.

Next stop, state polls

I won’t try to evaluate the relative importance of the different factors which can explain the fall in BN’s popularity among the Chinese voters (or the inability of the opposition to make gains among the Ibans and Melanaus). This task cannot be confidently undertaken without collecting individual level data using survey methodologies.

What I will try to do instead is to gauge the effects of this by-election on the upcoming Sarawak state elections.

Sibu has shown that it is more than likely that the Chinese voters in Sarawak will swing against the BN in the next state election, which must be called by May next year. The DAP can probably go into these elections confident in its ability to command a majority of the Chinese vote, especially in the urban areas in which the party is likely to contest.

But what should be troubling for the opposition coalition, which includes the DAP, is their inability to significantly swing the Iban and Melanau vote in its favour. Any talk of denying the BN a two-thirds majority in the Sarawak state elections has to start with a discussion of making at least some gains among the non-Muslim and Muslim bumiputera voters. As Sibu has shown, this possibility has not yet materialised.

It is still possible for BN in Sarawak to take stock of the lessons learned from Sibu and regroup itself in time for the next state election. But it is also possible that other issues may occupy the electorate centre stage in ways which can affect the BN’s significant advantage over the non-Chinese voters in the state.

The most important issue, arguably, is the issue of leadership succession. The lack of a clear succession plan at the chief minister level may result in the anti-CM sentiment spreading beyond the confines of the Chinese voters. Or a badly managed succession plan may result in the fractionalisation of the leadership of the PBB with possibly significant electoral consequences.

The worst possible outcome here would be some sort of a split within the ruling elites similar to the one which resulted in the formation of Permas, which together with PBDS, gave BN a run for its money in the 1987 state elections.

The uncertainties associated with the electoral outcomes in Sarawak probably mean that there is little chance that Prime Minister Najib Razak will call for a concurrent general election to be held together with the Sarawak state election. It is much better to use the state election as a ‘temperature gauge’ before calling the general election.

Pakatan Rakyat/DAP has scored a significant and morale boosting by-election victory in Sibu. This was a much needed victory especially given the defeat in Hulu Selangor, the string of high-level defections from PKR and the continued rumours of the impending fall of the Kedah state government.

The opposition can, and should, celebrate this victory. But the celebration will be short. As the DAP leaders depart for Peninsular Malaysia and the rest of Sarawak, the daunting challenge of holding back the BN tide in Peninsular Malaysia awaits them as does the equally challenging task of trying to win a larger share of the non-Chinese vote in the upcoming Sarawak state election.