The DA’s traditional base of white voters is being courted from all sides ahead of the 2019 general elections.
From the conservative right, the Freedom Front Plus has made inroads in taking support from conservative and Afrikaans DA voters in recent by-elections, while the ANC is courting the party’s progressive supporters from the left, sending its president, Cyril Ramaphosa, in to bring the votes home.
With Gauteng being anyone’s prize and with just more than a week to the polls, every vote becomes crucial as political parties vie for the votes to either hang on or take over SA’s economic hub.
The FF Plus has invoked the erstwhile DA slogan of “Slaan Terug” (Hit Back), while the ANC has gone on the charm offensive in Sandton and the Western Cape, and will campaign in Pretoria this week.
The ANC has effectively moved into the DA’s base in a bid to force it to fight for the votes it was traditionally very secure of, instead of allowing the official opposition party to solely focus on the votes it has to win to grow the party significantly.
White DA voters used to tell campaigners that they want to be left alone, but that they will vote for the DA, Business Day has been told. This is said to have changed, as DA campaigners now have to engage more on issues than before.
Nothing indicates the pressure on the DA’s base more than the party roping in its former leaders Helen Zille and Tony Leon to join the campaign trail in Gauteng. It has all the appearances of a campaign of reassurance to its traditional support base.
Leon and the DA’s Gauteng premier candidate, Solly Msimanga, were at pains last week to speak Afrikaans while addressing a meeting in the Alberton Civic Centre, while the party has also started sending out statements in Afrikaans.
Independent election analyst Dawie Scholtz told Business Day that a large part of the DA’s campaigning is aimed at ensuring that the party secures its suburban base, where the white vote predominates. The appearance of Leon in Gauteng last week, was a play to ensure that it keeps its base together, he said. Whether this has worked is yet to be seen.
“The risk to the DA is the Freedom Front Plus ... The focus is going to be on the conservative Afrikaans white voters and to what extent they are going to vote Freedom Front Plus.”
The FF Plus took about 20% of the votes away from the DA in the recent three by-elections, he said.
Besides this very obvious segment of Afrikaans voters who have increasingly felt that they have been sidelined by the DA, and who according to FF Plus leader Pieter Groenewald are telling his party they will no longer vote DA, there is said to be a small group of white South Africans who have truly drunk the Ramaphoria Kool-Aid.
A DA member who did not want to be named described the white support for Ramaphosa as coming from the so-called donor classes who live in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg and who think that just like a new CEO can fix a company, a new president can save the ANC.
The ANC’s white voter support has historically been at 4%, but the party says its internal polling has shown that it has grown to 8% in 2019.
Scholtz said although he has not seen any evidence of this increase in the recent by-elections, it may be possible. The ANC is courting the white vote from the DA, but this would probably have a bigger effect on the national ballot than on the provincial one.
The speculation is that former DA voters are looking to vote for the ANC nationally — more because of Ramaphosa than for love of the ANC — and to vote for the DA provincially.
Scholtz pointed out that political parties are clearly courting the white vote for the first time in a very long while. However, the white vote comprises only 10% of the whole electorate and a rise from 4% to 8% only represents 0.4% of the electorate.
“It is good for the ANC and other parties to grow their support in all demographic samples, but … I think the ANC is overinvesting time and campaign effort in the white vote given the only very marginal impact [that] a potential 5% increase in the white vote could have on its national figures,” Scholtz said.
“The much more important question, specifically for the ANC, is how they are going to do [among] the black electorate, and the turnout of the black electorate.”
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