Published 18 April 2017
St Kitts and Nevis (WINN): With Team Unity just past two years into its first term of office, there is no general election on the horizon at the moment.
However there appears to be a battle of the public opinion polls raging in the federation.
Citing a newly conducted Don Anderson poll, the governing Team Unity coalition says the results show that if an election were to be held now, Prime Minister Timothy Harris and his Government of National Unity would be re-elected to serve for another five-year term.
However the Denzil Douglas-led opposition St Kitts Nevis Labour Party is also making a similar claim, based, it says on a Bill Johnson poll the SKNLP commissioned.
“The conclusion is that if an election were called today, the electorate would vote strongly in support of Douglas and the Labour Party to replace Harris and the Team Unity government” the Labour Party quotes its commissioned public opinion poll as concluding.
The Don Anderson poll, released earlier than Labour’s Bill Johnson’s poll shows, the coalition says, that Team Unity would expand its constituency count, adding to the seven seats that its candidates won during the February 16th, 2015 general election.
Labour is countering that its Bill Johnson poll gives Party leader Douglas, the country’s opposition leader, a more favourable rating than Prime Minister Timothy Harris.
According to an SKNLP release, Dr Douglas enjoys a 67 per cent favourability rating compared to a 34 per cent rating for Dr Harris.
It says too, on the question of who would do a better job going forward, that “61.4% were convinced that Douglas would do a better job, 23.2% thought that Harris would, and 13.2% were undecided”.
The Don Anderson poll is said to have questioned 506 registered voters in the federation’s eleven constituencies, while 1100 likely voters are reported to have been polled in the Bill Johnson public opinion poll.
Don Anderson of Marketing Research Services Limited in Jamaica is a well known pollster in the region.
Bill Johnson too, is a Jamaica-based veteran pollster.
