2022 Elections in Kenya: Reinventing Opinion Polls

Deploying new thinking to address changing political equations

In an obvious breach of tradition, the approach used here to gauge voter preferences in the Kenyan general elections scheduled for 9th August 2022 has relied more on indirect methods, which have been facilitated by key informants and intelligence from unstructured data to yield results that depart from the latest figures published by established pollsters.

Unlike the published pollster figures, the model results here suggest there will be no run-off in the presidential race with the winner garnering 56% of the valid votes cast, ahead of the runner-up’s 42%.

Background

Opinion polls, pioneered by George Horace Gallup, have been conducted since the 1930s to gauge public opinion. The statistical method of survey sampling has remained the traditional approach. There is a fascinating case to be made that the advent of big data and technological progress offers plenty of opportunity for inventing new ways of obtaining reliable information about voters’ opinions and attitudes, including unearthing what underlies their covert sentiments. In 2018, Miroslaw Szreder wrote a piece making a similar case under the title Will Big Data Affect Opinion Polls.

Kenyans go to vote on 9th August 2022 to elect a new government. The Republic of Kenya has been a quasi-federal state of 47 counties under a new constitution, since 2013. There…