If just about no one tries to understand what most voters think and feel, election results will often be a nasty disappointment.
Observers of the election campaign might notice an oddity that has become a feature of politics in SA. If we rely on social and regular media we would expect the ANC to win no votes at all. Even before load-shedding resumed, social media, radio talk shows and newspaper pages were filled with anger and scorn, all directed at the governing party. The air is thick with predictions that it will no longer govern after the results are in.
But both by-election results and polls predict that the ANC will be re-elected with a working national majority and will govern at least seven provinces. The debate is about how big its majority will be, not whether it will achieve one.
Why this gap? Because the ANC has lost the support of the black middle-class, it will be re-elected largely by poor and working-class voters. But only middle-class voices are heard in social and regular media. Democracy’s key flaw here is that it gives a voice only to the insider minority who assume they are the entire country. And so most voters are ignored or seen as a problem — an unthinking mass who lack the political smarts of their middle-class betters. They are never listened to or understood.
This will probably ensure a result that will shock many insiders, who will blame the majority for their supposed foolishness. Not all will descend to the bigotry of the cartoonist who in 2014 depicted most voters as buffoons, but most will find polite ways to say much the same.
In the hope of avoiding the disappointment and the prejudices it triggers, what do we know about most voters and why they are likely to ignore the middle-class consensus? It is dodgy to make claims about how millions of voters think. Different people have different views and we need far more information on how most voters outside the middle class see the election. But we do have research that, with some interpretation, offers insight into how many voters are thinking.
— Many people in [the] townships associate the ANC with social grants and other improvements in their lives since 1994 and don’t believe another governing party would offer these benefits.
It tells us that many people in shack settlements and townships associate the ANC with social grants and other improvements in their lives since 1994 and don’t believe another governing party would offer these benefits. Some commentators claim this means they are “bought off” — but why is it acceptable for people to receive tax rebates or industry subsidies but not grants? These voters support policies that serve their interests, just as the middle-class does.
They know the government is often corrupt or arrogant and don’t like this any more than middle-class voters. But they put up with and support the ANC as long as they do not believe the corruption has become so serious that it wipes out the benefits they receive.
In 2016, more than a few decided that ANC politicians were so absorbed in looking after themselves rather than voters that the costs had become unacceptable. But many now believe the change in ANC leadership will reduce the corruption to levels they are willing to bear if the policies they support remain.
Whether these voters are right that the benefits would go if the ANC were voted out or that corruption will now be reduced are, like all political opinions, open to debate. But their views are not irrational — it is far more reasoned than the consensus among some well-off suburbanites that they should support the official opposition whatever it does.
As long as most voters’ views are discussed only in research papers, there will be a wide gap between the election about which the minority talks and that in which the majority votes.
• Friedman is research professor with the humanities faculty of the University of Johannesburg.
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