With a month to go to South Africa's fifth democratic election, opinion polls and predictions are the order of the day.
Most analysts like to use the 2009 Election as the benchmark for assessing party growth or decline in today's polls. However, the electorate did go to the polls in the local government elections in 2011 when the PR (proportional representation) ballot was the last major test of voter loyalties on a national basis.
In that ballot, the ANC trended downwards from 2009, scoring 62.9% of the vote compared with 65.9% in 2009. Despite the relatively small 3% swing away from the ruling party this was a worrying drop in support for the ruling party.
The real winners in terms of voter growth in 2011 were the Democratic Alliance whose vote bounced from 16.6% in 2009 to an impressive 24.1%. Given the surge in support for the official opposition that occurred in the 24 months between the two polls (and the addition of Patricia de Lille's Independent Democrats), the DA began to envisage a clear target of 30% in 2014.
The smaller parties fared poorly. COPE shed the rump of its support base declining from its 2009 7.4% to a paltry 2.2%. Similarly, the IFP went from 4.5% to 2.6%.
In other words, our base for projecting 2014 results should be the last major poll, that from 2011. If we accept this, the ANC is defending a lower tally of 62.9% while the DA defends its better-than-expected result of 24.1%.