Once again, Labour Party’s presidential flagbearer Peter Obi has won the opinion poll commissioned by Anap Foundation and conducted by NOI Polls Limited. Obi leads three other presidential contestants by more than 10% average in the third and final nationwide poll commissioned by Anap ahead of the February 25 presidential election.
The result of the final poll, which was released on Wednesday by the President and Founder of Anap Foundation Atedo Peterside, showed Obi scored 21% ahead of his closest rivals Bola Tinubu, Atiku Abubakar and Rabiu Kwankwaso, who polled 13%, 10% and 3% respectively.
“Obi leads with 21% of registered voters proposing to vote for him if the presidential election were to be conducted today; and 13% proposing to vote for Tinubu who fell in second place. Atiku was third with 10% and Kwankwaso was a distant fourth with 3% of voters proposing to vote for him.
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| Poll Question: Suppose the presidential election is being conducted today, who are you likely to vote for? | |||||||||||||||||
| Total (%) | Distribution across Geo-Political Zones | Poll Ranking | |||||||||||||||
| North Central | North East | North West | South East | South South | South West | ||||||||||||
| Peter Obi (LP) | 21% | 24% | 6% | 8% | 53% | 38% | 14% | 1st | |||||||||
| Bola Tinubu (APC) | 13% | 16% | 16% | 20% | 1% | 3% | 15% | 2nd | |||||||||
| Atiku Abubakar (PDP) | 10% | 4% | 17% | 20% | 3% | 5% | 3% | 3rd | |||||||||
| Rabiu Kwankwaso (NNPP) | 3% | 1% | 4% | 8% | 0% | 1% | 0% | 4th | |||||||||
| Undecided | 23% | 20% | 28% | 26% | 7% | 19% | 30% | ||||||||||
| Refused | 30% | 35% | 29% | 18% | 36% | 34% | 38% | ||||||||||
| Total | 100% | ||||||||||||||||
| Source: NOIPolls – February2023 | |||||||||||||||||
The third and final poll, which was concluded in the first half of February 2023, came after two earlier polls conducted in September and December 2022 that Obi also won. The poll also noted 23% undecided voters and 30% others who refused to say who they will vote.
“Undecided voters and those who prefer not to reveal their preferred candidate add up to a whopping 23% and 30% respectively. The gender split of undecided voters shows that 27% of women are undecided versus 18% of male registered voters,” Anap said.
But the organization said “the undecided” and “the refused” have no bearing on the outcome of the poll which has rightly called three presidential elections in the past.
“Given the large pool of undecided voters and/or those who refused to disclose their preferred choice, Mr. Peter Obi’s 8%-point lead at this stage is significant, but not sufficient to separate him from a leading pack of candidates scoring 13%, 10% and 3%,” it said.
Anap said in a statement that it used the same methodology that rightly called the result of presidential elections in the past to conduct the three polls which Obi has emerged the winner.
“For the avoidance of doubt, it is pertinent to mention that the methodology used by NOI polls is almost the exact same methodology that was used in previous presidential polls that they handled for us in 2011, 2015 and 2019.
“In all those past presidential polls, the front-runner that was identified by our polls ended up winning the elections, irrespective of a rather large percentage of voters who were undecided and/or refused to indicate who their preferred candidate was.
“We have also applied the exact same methodology in our various governorship polls carried out in 2011, 2014, 2015, 2019 and 2022 and the methodology generally held up well,” it said.
Anap is not the only organization to conduct repeated polls in which Obi leads other candidates. Last week, Bloomberg News by Premise Data poll, once again, called it for Obi. Several other polls have also done the same, raising the hope of millions of his supporters that he will win the 2023 presidential election.