Governance Research Bureau cautions NPP over Western Region complacency

The Governance Research Bureau has cautioned the NPP against believing that it would win the Western Region in the 2020 presidential election as they did in 2016.

Rather, the Bureau said, the NPP should research into the factors that led to the loss of the incumbent NDC in the Region and learn lessons from them because they find themselves in a similar situation as the NDC in 2016.

The caution came from Dr Kwame Asah Asante and Dr Ezekiel Nortey, both Resource Persons from the Governance Research Bureau, while discussing the 2020 elections on TV3’s Election Watch programme last Sunday from the perspectives of political science and statistics.

Speaking on the electoral performance of the two parties, they said in the 2016 presidential election, the NPP’s average votes of 482,000 in the Western Region, since 1992, shot up dramatically to 500,000 while that of the NDC’s average vote of 520,000 dropped to 482,000.

This, according to them, should be a source of concern to the NDC because their loss was a gain for the NPP, which overturned the tables by winning 16 out of the 26 constituencies in the Region, the same seats that were won by the NDC in 2012. 69

They said the performance of the NPP in the Region in 2016 reflected the Region’s status as a swing region in which victory had alternated between the two parties.

Predicting a winning formula for the 2020 presidential election in the Region based on a statistical model using data from previous election results, the Resource Persons recommended that the NDC should work to maintain their average performance of 520,000 votes or better it, in addition to winning Shama, which is a swing constituency with huge votes.

For the NPP, Dr Asa Asante and Dr Nortey, both Senior Lecturers at the University of Ghana, Legon, urged them to work to maintain or improve their average performance in their strongholds, gain more votes in NDC strongholds and also win the Shama constituency.