This weekend the Sunday Times stated that "The African National Congress will be returned to parliament with a greater majority than it achieved in the previous election, despite an internal split which has given birth to a new political party."
The basis for this claim was an opinion poll conducted by Plus 94 Research which, the newspaper reported, found that if "South Africans were to participate in elections now, an overwhelming 74% of decided voters would cast their ballot for the ANC - 5% more than in the 2004 election."
The wire services picked on this story - and generally the story has been reported as being good news for the ANC and extremely bad news for the Congress of the People. But the full results of the poll can be subjected to the opposite interpretation. If COPE realises its full potential the ANC could be in serious trouble electorally.
3500 homes were covered by the researchers, who conducted face-to-face interviews. The respondents were asked, in the voting intention questions, whether they had a "favourite political party...that is to say, one you would definitely vote for in the next general election?" 61% of respondents said yes, and 39% said no. Of those who expressed a definite preference 74% said they would vote for the ANC in 2009, 12% said they supported the DA, and only 0.2% said "Shikota".
It is on the basis of these results that the Sunday Times came to the conclusion that it did. However, there are two reasons for treading carefully before directly extrapolating these results to the elections next year.
The first reason for caution is that compared to other opinion polls 39% is a very high non-response rate. (For instance, the non-response rate for the poll conducted by Markdata earlier this year - see here - was 15,5%.) This could be due to the way the question was asked or inexperienced field work teams. Or, it could possibly reflect an increase in uncertainty within the electorate. It is not impossible that the breakaway has confused existing voter preferences.