• The 6.9 million voters who elected Gotabaya Rajapaksa are the most numerically significant group that can decide the election 

When political pundits call the Presidential election of 2024 the most unpredictable of recent times, they are right. But then they attribute the uncertainty to the popular public anger at the traditional political establishment in the backdrop of the economic crisis. That is not without a grain of truth. However, it is over-simplifying and self-serving. It is oversimplifying because they often rely on chattering classes of the most vocal and closeted party activists to gauge public anger. It is self-serving because this has often made the self-proclaimed outsiders, such as the JVP, claim the election is theirs.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa

More than anything, the pundits overlook the most significant portion of the Sri Lankan electorate, who will decide the outcome of the presidential race. They are the 6.9 million voters who elected Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
They are the most numerically significant group that can decide the election. The current polls are uncertain because no one is sure where the large swathe of these voters would cast their vote. 

Another popular fallacy is the fragmentation of the traditional conservative vote bloc that voted for the UNP, SJB and the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP). What is fragmented is not exactly the traditional bloc vote per se but the bloc vote of the SLPP, which happened to have the largest vote base at its untimely explosion.
  By the last count of Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s election victory, it accounted for 6,924,255. This number includes a large swath of approximately 2 million floating votes. But, still, five million of the core vote base of Mahinda Rajapaksa, whose voters are now in disarray, is the most statistically significant portion of this election. Analyzing how they will vote is guesswork, making the current election difficult to call.  

 They did not simply disappear- they would return to cast their vote on September 21. And their vote will be the deterministic factor of the election. 

The overwhelming sense of unpredictability is a novelty in electoral politics in the country. Consider previous elections – they were down to a number game or one-horse races. Two Presidential elections were one-horse races: the 2010 presidential election, which Mahinda Rajapaksa won against Sarath Fonseka and the 2019 election, Gotabaya Rajapaksa won against Sajith Premadasa. In both cases, the winner rode in a high wave of popular support that no number game could negate their electoral advantage.  

General election 

Presidential elections generally set the tempo for the general election that follows, still, unlike the 2019 rout of SJB in the general election, Rajapaksa’s UPFA went to poll 4.7 million votes, a tad 300,000 short of the winning UNP in the 2015 general election. That is the core vote base in action, unencumbered by the loss of the presidential election. 

In other instances,  such as the 2015 presidential election, the outcome was decided by clever arithmetic manoeuvring designed to negate the Southern electoral advantage of Mahinda Rajapaksa. In 2015, Maithripala’s choice was to eat into around one million Southern voters who would otherwise vote for MR and overwhelm his reduced advantage in the South with an overwhelming minority vote in the North and East. 

The local government election in 2018 that set off the demise of the Good Governance Alliance was also a case in point of how things play out when you run roughshod against the number game. In that case, SLFP led by Maithripala Sirisena, who was unhappy that Ranil Wickremesinghe refused to support his run for a second term, decided to go it alone. The result was an overwhelming victory for the newly formed Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), which polled 5,006,837 votes (40.47%). However, the divided UNP (29.42%) -UPFA (12.10%) alliance still had a larger share of votes. Therefore, rather than a major change in the mood of the electorate, the numbers went awry for the UNP-UPFA.  

The current presidential race, as it stands, is an uneven three-way race where no single candidate can dominate the electorate. At the same time, no amount of smart arithmetic jilmart or tactical voting could hold water when an overwhelming portion of the 6.9 million election-winning- bloc of voters is not counted in the equation.  
One might say that these 6.9 million voters are not a monolithic entity. That may be the case, but they are vastly uniform in their outlook and aspirations.   Of them, a good 4 million or more are the bloc vote of Mahinda Rajapaksa, who had polled more than 5 million or more easily in every previous election. 

However, the SLPP is in disarray, and the larger portion of the same constituency has taken the brunt of the economic crisis. The extent of the damage wrought upon the poor and lower middle class that forms the bulk of the Rajapaksa’s loyal base is so significant that it has significantly eroded his support. Namal Rajapaksa may be running on the false belief that he could win a sizable part of that vote base. However, even in the most optimistic scenario, he is unlikely to win more than 10-15 per cent of the Rajapaksa bloc vote. Though that is not an election winner, the objective is probably to deprive Ranil Wickremesinghe of some of these votes. 

Where the vast majority of the Rajapaksa bloc vote would now go is guesswork. So is where the floating vote of two million votes that Gotabaya Rajapaksa added to his winning margin. 

voters

The tendency among some quarters is to delegitimise these voters as anti-Tamil, Islamophobic and  Sinhala Buddhist extremists, etc. That is, again, sour grapes. There is no gainsaying that the 2019 election was racially charged, more than anything else, because of the multiple suicide attacks by  Islamist terrorists and manifest security lapses on the part of the government. 

However, the vast majority of these voters are nationalists, who, like the vast majority of Sri Lankans now, were distraught by the continued failure of the successive governments and inspired by Gota’s promise of an efficient government with a nationalistic flavour. 

Needless to say, a good part of them were influenced by conspiracy theories. However, the success of such conspiracy theories was also due to the government’s failure, among other things, to have a degree of political control that is paramount for effective governance. 

The economic crisis has unleashed both physical and psychological shock on these voters as consequential as the Easter Sunday attack. However, the collective disappointment at Gota’s letdown still haunts them. That may explain their silence. The economic trauma might have tempted their aspirations, including ethno- nationalism and economic nationalism. Once bitten twice shy, would they seek the continuation of political stability and economic reforms? Or would they opt for another round of dangerous political gamble? Either way, they will be the ones who would decide the election.

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