Why Leni Robredo lost the election to Marcos

This is in despite of mammoth rally and well known celebrities who back her presidential bid

By Edward Era Barbacena

IT has been 12 days since the elections of May 9, 2022 in the Philippines and the results have already sunk in for me. For the presidential race, since the withdrawal of Sen. Christopher Lawrence "Bong" Go, I have been a fence-sitter as none of the frontrunners were palatable choices to me. I was critical of former senator Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Vice President Maria Leonor Robredo, although I targeted Marcos more in my social media posts because he was the runaway frontrunner according to the pre-election surveys..

The results have been predictable and expected. The pre-election surveys have consistently placed candidate Marcos ahead by a projected majority of the votes.

It is probably too early to write something about what lies ahead for the incoming administration of the presumptive president. I might also write my analysis of what worked for the Marcos campaign in a future column. But for now, my focus rests on what went wrong for Robredo and the "kakampinks," as well as what the main political opposition needs to do moving forward to recover from three consecutive losses in the polls, beginning with the 2016 presidential elections all the way to the senatorial elections of 2019 and now the presidential elections of 2022.

The political opposition needs to reboot. Three consecutive losses is not just the writing on the wall, it is a message from the Filipino people etched in stone.

There needs to be a complete and total leadership overhaul in the opposition. Their approach to the elections of 2016, 2019 and 2022 remained largely the same in spite of the losses. How can any competent leadership make this kind of demented mistake again and again? How can any sane person believe that the same formula will succeed loss after loss after loss? It is utter madness!

For instance, they insisted on fielding Mrs. Robredo as their standard-bearer even if her net satisfaction ratings as vice president, according to trusted pollster Social Weather Stations, plummeted from plus 36 percent in December 2019 to just plus 1 percent by December 2021, just before the campaign officially started. In fact, both the speaker of the House of Representatives and the chief justice of the Supreme Court traditionally have the lowest net satisfaction among the top officials of the country. However, by December 2021, both Speaker Lord Allan Velasco (plus 5 percent) and Chief Justice Alexander Gesmundo (plus 7 percent) had higher net satisfaction ratings than Vice President Robredo.

The opposition completely ignored and disregarded the feedback given to them by the Filipino people through the survey results from reputable pollsters.

Advertising professional Greg Garcia, in a television interview, criticized the opposition's disparagement of the Duterte administration with their tagline of "gobyernong tapat, angat buhay lahat." Garcia pointed out that President Rodrigo Duterte continued to have astonishing approval ratings late in his term of office. Compared, for instance, with Robredo's plus 1 percent net satisfaction rating in December 2021, Duterte had plus 60 percent in the same period.

One would expect that given the unpopularity of Mrs. Robredo vis-à-vis the commitment the opposition already had to her candidacy, she should never have been made the face of the campaign. I remember a while back when Jamby Madrigal successfully ran for the Senate in 2004, the face of her campaign was popular actress Judy Anne Santos.

Furthermore, Garcia reduced the main presidential election narratives into either continuity or change; candidate Marcos wisely harped on the message of continuity (in the backdrop of Duterte's stratospheric numbers) while Robredo foolishly went with change and against the electorate.

Put simply, a successful political opposition cannot be pigheaded in the face of cold, hard data. Even in the academe, it is a truism for researchers to always follow what the data says.

Yet, confronted by the undeniable truth that an overwhelming majority of Filipinos favor the current administration, the political opposition still decided to attack President Duterte, as observed by Garcia.

The opposition already tried this approach in the 2019 senatorial elections; every day of the campaign three years ago the opposition Otso Diretso slate made Duterte the main electoral issue. The result? None of the valiant eight opposition candidates made it. Then reelectionist senator Paolo Benigno Aquino 4th was the best performer out of the eight, garnering slightly less than 30 percent and placing 14th. In fairness, Aquino was only less than one percentage point behind the 12th placer Sen. Nancy Binay, who got 30.67 percent of the votes.

Bam  Aquino - The campaign manager of  Leni Robredo

All over social media, people are wondering why Bam Aquino was designated the campaign manager of Robredo when he himself could not even win in the senatorial race of 2019 even with the distinct advantage of being a reelectionist.

It really makes one ask: "What the hell were they thinking?"