The growing middle, 2022

ANY candidate that looks only at the peripheries misses out on a huge swath of territory in campaigns, and those are voters in the middle of an array. In the case of the country, there are fringes occupied by the Yellows together with progressives who have formed an alliance for purposes of increasing the shrillness against President Rodrigo Roa Duterte (PRRD), and directly at the opposite end are so-called diehard supporters of Duterte, predominantly class D and E from Mindanao and who are veteran voters.

At the local level, there are those in support of the candidate (base) versus those in support of the opponent (his/her base) and the middle is known as the undecided, those who have not decided. Undecided is very hard to quantify at the national level because of the state of data analytics. The Comelec does not have. Other words used to categorize undecideds, persuadable are swing voters or cross-pressured, but they are not the same as conventional wisdom has often made. The use of wedge issues, micro-targeting to identify these voters are the tools to determine how to persuade voters to shift vote.