Voting patterns in Trinidad have tended to indicate that 33 of the 39 constituencies are relatively safe seats for either the People’s National Movement (PNM) or the United National Congress (UNC).
That means there are six seats that will determine the fate of the 2015 general elections, which all the polls so far predict will be close.
With a view to getting the pulse of the six marginal seats, Guardian Media Ltd hired renowned pollster Louis Bertrand to conduct face-to-face surveys in these make-or-break constituencies, which are similar in that they comprise electors of both of T&T’s major ethnicities, often in almost equal numbers and that have swung from one party to the next over the years.
GML gets the ball rolling with Tunapuna, which Bertrand describes as the “most volatile of the constituencies.”
Going back 20 years, the marginality of the Tunapuna constituency is clear.
In the 1995 general election, the PNM’s Eddie Hart won the constituency by a margin of 3.37 per cent, gaining 7,467 votes to the 7,223 electors who voted for the UNC’s Hector McLean.
Of the 15,225 votes cast, Hart won by 244 votes, which was 1.6 per cent of the votes cast in that election.
In the 2000 election, which the UNC won by 19 seats to the PNM’s 16 with one for the National Alliance for Reconstruction, the UNC’s Mervyn Assam took the seat from Hart by a margin of 3.8 per cent.
Some 9,062 people voting for Assam and 8,726 voting for Hart. That’s 336 votes out of 17,985 people casting their ballots.
In the controversial 2001 election, which ended in an 18-18 dead heat between the PNM and the UNC,the margin between the winner and the loser was even narrower.
The PNM’s Hart received 8,792 votes, winning the seat from the UNC’s Assam, who got 8,538 votes, by a margin of 2.9 per cent or 254 votes.
Even in the 2002 general election, which the PNM won comfortably by 20 seats to the UNC’s 16, Hart won the constituency by a margin of 6.5 per cent.
Some 10,154 people voted for Hart, who edged out former CL Financial executive Carlos John by 624 votes.
In 2007, Esther Le Gendre, who received 8,494 votes, won the seat for the PNM by a wide margin over Clyde Weatherhead of the Congress of the People, for whom 4,182 people cast their vote.
But in that general election, Weatherhead ran against both the PNM and the UNC’s Christine Newallo-Hosein, who is currently the Minister of the People.
Had the UNC and the COP presented one candidate, they still would not have won as together they would have polled 8,168 votes, which would have fallen short of Le Gendre by 3.9 per cent.
In 2010, when the country voted against former Prime Minister Patrick Manning, the margin of victory for Winston Dookeran was the widest in the six elections since 1995.
Dookeran got 10,466 votes, a 28 margin over the PNM’s Le Gendre, who received 8,149 votes.
At the end of the day, while Tunapuna is a marginal constituency, there are clearly marginal polling stations within that constituency.
One such is the four polling divisions in the St Augustine Secondary School polling station, on the corner of Gordon and Warren Streets, St Augustine.
Mainly a middle-to-upper middle income seat, with voters from Santa Margarita, it went PNM with 682 votes to the UNC’s 653.
The COP’s Clyde Weathehead beat the PNM’s Le Gendre in that polling station by a margin of 600 to 586 votes. Newallo-Hosein got another 343 votes in that polling station.