The ENCA Voter Survey, 2024

In 2019 the ENCA television group commissioned Markdata to conduct a pre-election survey. This survey was the most accurate of all the pre-election polls conducted that year in coming up with data closest to the actual election results.

In 2024 ENCA decided to repeat that survey. Markdata again conducted face-to-face interviews of a representative sample of 3,022 with the sample expanded to 6,000 for a small number of key questions.

All interviews were conducted in the language chosen by the respondent usually by an interviewer of the same language group and care was taken that the interview was out of earshot for anyone else since the presence of others inevitably exercises social pressures of one kind or another.

ENCA commissioned three people to construct the survey and analyse the data: Jan Jan Joubert, R.W. Johnson and Wayne Sussman. Below are some of the key findings.

TURNOUT

- has been steadily falling since 1994. It is a key component of the ultimate results. All indications are that the Multi-Party Charter initiative has strengthened morale in the participant parties. One result is much higher voter registration in DA strongholds than in ANC strongholds – for, as a multitude of results from our survey shows, ANC voter morale is very low.

In general, lower turnout hurts the ANC more than other parties. This is very visible in municipal elections where the DA invariably achieves higher voter turnouts than the ANC, and the DA consequently does better in those elections.

Voter turnout was down to 66.05% in 2019 but all indications are that it will fall again in 2024, perhaps even drastically.

In our survey 20.9% of respondents refused to answer, said they wouldn’t vote in 2024 or were Don’t Knows. All were eliminated from calculations of voter choice. But that still left 79.1% as likely voters – an impossibly high figure.

As all survey analysts know, most respondents feel inclined to say they will vote because they know that this is seen as the mark of good citizenship. But this always exaggerates the ultimate turnout.

So we then asked how likely it was that respondents would vote:

In general one can only rely on the 49.8% who say they will certainly vote to actually vote. In practice many of those in the subsequent categories – probably vote, if there is time, depends how they feel on the day – will not vote. So this suggests turnout will fall again, this time to under 60%.

When it came to voting intentions, our survey came up with the following figures:

National party choice, 2024

Voter intentions in KwaZulu-Natal, 2024

Voter opinion in the Western Cape, 2024

Voter opinion in Gauteng, 2024

Voter opinion in the Northern Cape*, 2024

* The Northern Cape has the smallest population of any province which in turn means that it has the smallest number of respondents in our sample. The fact that this province’s sample is small means that the potential margin of error is far greater here.

Voter opinion in the Eastern Cape, 2024

Voter opinion in the Free State, 2024

Voter opinion in Limpopo, 2024

Voter opinion in Mpumalanga, 2024

Voter opinion in the North West, 2024

ENDS