The survey, which asked voters which party they would vote for if the legislative election were to be held today, was conducted face-to-face from Oct. 3 to Oct. 9. 

“Even when there’s still 19.3 percent of undecided voters, support for the PDI-P remains sizable," SMRC executive director Deni Irvani said on Sunday.

Second and third-placed Gerindra and Golkar trail behind with 13.4 percent and 8.5 percent electability, respectively. With the top three still in the same position, Deni said that the pecking order at the top hasn’t shown any change since 2019.

But warning signs are beginning to show for NasDem and PAN, currently the fifth and eighth largest parties in the House of Representatives.

NasDem netted 5.4 percent of the votes, down from the 9.1 percent of votes they won in 2019. 

It’s even worse for PAN, which only garnered 1.2 percent, down from 6.8 percent in 2019 and far below the 4 percent parliamentary threshold the party needs to maintain their presence in the House.

As the election is still more than a year away, Deni said there was still time to court the undecided voters and boost their electability. But both PAN and NasDem face an uphill battle in maintaining support from voters that supported them in 2019.

Loyalty crisis

“These fluctuations are indicative of how Indonesians tend to vote. We share no psychological bond with the political parties, which makes us somewhat disloyal, hence the huge swings in the party’s electability,” Deni explained.

On average, only 58 percent of respondents plan to vote for the same party they voted for in 2019, with 31 percent planning on switching sides, while 11 percent remain undecided. 

The PDI-P is one of the biggest beneficiaries, with the party stealing 10 percent of Gerindra voters and 12 percent of the Democratic Party voters, while still retaining 66 percent of their own supporters.

On the other end of the spectrum, PAN and NasDem are the two biggest losers. Only 42 percent of respondents who voted for PAN in 2019 are planning to do the same in 2024, with 19 percent jumping ship to fellow Islam-based Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) and PAN failing to woo a sizable number of voters from other parties.

Speaking to The Jakarta Post on Wednesday, PAN deputy chairman Viva Yoga Mauladi remains optimistic, as swing voters is a universal issue faced by every political party. “There are always voters switching their allegiance and we’ve always tried to build a new base to replace those lost votes,” said Viva.

Viva said that this strategy hasn’t failed PAN, as various pollsters have in the past predicted that PAN wouldn’t make it past the parliamentary threshold only to be proven wrong come election day.

Coattail effect

NasDem fared slightly better, with 45 percent of NasDem voters in the last election choosing to remain loyal. Unlike PAN however, the party also managed to steal potential votes from other parties, with 6 percent of Gerindra voters and 4 percent of PAN voters in 2019 planning to back NasDem in 2024.

While the party will take the SMRC’s survey results into consideration, NasDem politician Willy Aditya said that the party won’t focus on just one survey. 

“We did well in other surveys and it’s normal for one survey to differ from the other,” Willy told the Post on Wednesday.

As the election is still more than one year away, he reasoned that there was still time for NasDem to improve their electability. “Besides, the previous two elections show that we tend to outperform what the survey says, so we hope this trend will continue in 2024,” said Willy.

As the party among the first to throw support for a presidential candidate – in backing former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan, NasDem has seen a slight increase in their electability since their declaration on Oct. 1. 

NasDem’s current electability of 5.4 percent represents an increase over the 3.5 percent a similar SMRC survey found in August.

Previously, analysts see the party’s early endorsement as a way for NasDem to latch onto Anies’ relative popularity.