From left, Phillips and Simpson Miller
AMID TALKS of a possible merger between People's National Party (PNP) leadership contenders Portia Simpson Miller and Omar Davies, and just a week after the Gleaner-commissioned Don Anderson polls gave Mrs. Simpson Miller a giant lead on other contenders, an analysis of delegate voting patterns has cast a different spin on things to come.
Former Local Government Minister Arnold Bertram, a member of the PNP, and a clear supporter of leadership hopeful Dr. Peter Phillips - Simpson Miller's chief rival for the top spot - has claimed that the overwhelming support shown for her in the most recent Don Anderson Poll is tainted by the presence of supporters of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) who would still vote for the Opposition when faced with a national election.
In a column, published in The Sunday Gleaner today, he says the national survey neither reflects the will of the PNP's more than 4,000 delegates, who are to vote for the party's next leader some time before April next year, nor Mrs. Simpson Miller's ability to defeat Opposition Leader Bruce Golding and the JLP in the next general election, constitutionally due by 2007.
He also stresses that the PNP's delegates have a clear tradition of voting for leaders with "capacity and vision", a not too subtle slap at Simpson Miller's perceived intellectual limitations.
He has suggested that the rallying cries of JLP supporters on Simpson Miller's campaign trail, if allowed to sway PNP delegates, would lead to a political ambush by the Opposition and the defeat of the PNP at the polls.
Along with her 57 per cent popular support for leadership of the PNP, compared to Dr. Phillips' 19.8 per cent, Simpson Miller led the pack, with more than 58 per cent of the 1,000 persons interviewed for the poll believing she had the best chance of defeating Golding.
DELEGATES TO DECIDE
Anderson, however, admitted in his analysis that it was the delegates and not the public who would decide the next leader of the PNP.
To date, the majority of the PNP Members of Parliament have declared their support for Dr. Phillips.
In the Stone Poll conducted prior to the last PNP leadership election in 1992, Simpson Miller held 42 per cent support to Patterson's 24. Eventually, however, Patterson took the presidency with a 71 per cent win.
But with the final delegates list not scheduled to be ready until the first week in January 2006, and virtually no way of conducting a poll of those on it, there is no clear and accurate marker of how they will vote.
Bertram, however, claims the party's regional elections, held in the first week of September, are the only indicator of how the delegates are likely to vote.
He notes that, in those elections, both Dr. Phillips and Simpson Miller had their slate of candidates competing for the 60 members who would be directly elected to form the constituencies to the party's National Executive Council.
"Of the 60 members elected, 34 were from Phillips' 'Solid as a Rock' team," he says.
