Ahead of the forthcoming 2023 Nigerian Presidential elections, a third and final nationwide opinion poll was commissioned by Anap Foundation and conducted by NOI Polls Limited (NOIPolls). This third Poll in the series was concluded in the first half of February 2023 and follows two earlier Polls carried out (using the exact same methodology) in September and December 2022. We believe our baseline Presidential Poll published on 15 September, 2022 was the first well-publicised national poll released in connection with the 2023 Presidential elections, which was followed by a Bloomberg poll published on 28 September, 2022.
For the avoidance of doubt, it is pertinent to mention that the methodology used by NOIPolls is almost the exact same methodology that was used in previous Presidential Polls that they handled for us in 2011, 2015 and 2019. In all those past Presidential Polls, the front-runner that was identified by our Polls ended up winning the elections, irrespective of a rather large percentage of voters who were Undecided and/or Refused to indicate who their preferred candidate was. We have also applied the exact same methodology in our various Governorship Polls carried out in 2011, 2014, 2015, 2019 and 2022 and the methodology generally held up well. We are of course aware of some significant differences between the 2023 Presidential race and those of prior years e.g. 1) A longer Campaign season: 2) the presence of 4 major candidates instead of 2; and 3) greater voter enthusiasm.
In December 2022, we took the extra step to expand the methodology in our 2nd Presidential Poll in this series by carrying out 3 different polls using sample sizes of 1,000, 2,000 and 3,000 and confirmed that (as expected) the results did not change significantly. This notwithstanding, we chose a sample size of 2,000 for our third and final poll in February 2023 as opposed to the 1,000 sample size we used for the published September and December 2022 poll.
Our 3rd and Final Poll result in February, 2023 reveals that Mr. Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) remains in the lead, with Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and Alhaji Atiku Abubakar of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) both trailing him. Dr. Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) emerged as the lone outsider. Mr. Peter Obi leads, with 21% of registered voters proposing to vote for him if the presidential election were to be conducted today; and 13% proposing to vote for Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu who fell in second place. Alhaji Atiku Abubakar was third with 10% and Dr. Rabiu Kwankwaso was a distant fourth with 3% of voters proposing to vote for him.
Given the large pool of Undecided Voters and/or those who Refused to disclose their preferred choice, Mr. Peter Obi’s 8%-point lead at this stage is significant, but not sufficient to separate him from a leading pack of candidates scoring 13%, 10% and 3%. Undecided voters and those who prefer not to reveal their preferred candidate add up to a whopping 23% and 30% respectively. The gender split of undecided voters shows that 27% of women are undecided versus 18% of male registered voters.
