Elections: Understanding UMNO/BN’s Strategy

ARCHIVES 2010

By admin-s On Sep 18, 2010

BN’s strategy is then very simple – keep the fence-sitters neutral. Either encourage them not vote or get them to spoil their vote. The more the fence-sitters remain neutral, the bigger the advantage for BN. That is all UMNO needs to win as they have a 6% in-built advantage already.

By pywong (Tindak Malaysia)

UMNO knows that they have lost it and they are getting extremely worried. Considering past election results we can see that UMNO/BN enjoys a 6% vote incumbency advantage going into the elections. (From gerrymandering, misallocation of voters, phantom voters, postal voters, SPR, police, govt machinery biased, even outright cheating and bribery). This is a huge handicap against the opposition. Imagine you have a footbal team down 6 goals at the start of the match, with the referee and the linesmen against you. That is why UMNO/BN has always won the GE over the past 53 years!

Moving forward, UMNO has accepted that they cannot rely on MCA, MIC and Gerakan anymore. So they have decided to dump them, go direct to the voters and concentrate on Sabah and Sarawak. It is possible that if UMNO is still successful in the next GE, they will drop the 3 Peninsular Malaysia stooges (MCA, MIC & Gerakan) and team up with Sabah and Sarawak. It will still possible for them to cobble together a working majority with 115 to 120 seats.

Their strategy here on is becoming clearer, using memes.

1. Outsource the dirty work to PERKASA and other UMNO-sponsored NGOs. Their role is to generate a lot of heat and distraction over race and religion to create fear and distract the people from their real strategy. So far, the fear tactics hasn’t worked that well, even with cow-heads and church fire-bombings. The distracting is creating a backlash which UMNO is starting to feel uncomfortable with. They are now trying another tactic: Leak stories about purchase of illegal arms by shadowy militias in Malaysia.

2. Outsource the image make-over and branding to the Jews – APCO. This has the advantage of buying into the good books of the US. Mobilize all the msm, bloggers, ngos to support them. Focus exclusively on 1Malaysia, which most of us know, is merely spin. But a significant % still fall for it.

3. Typically, in a general election, the voter support between BN and PR is 30% each with 40% fence-sitters in the middle. BN enjoys an incumbency advantage of 6% which means that BN has 36% support, PR 30% and Fence-sitters reduced to 34%. The fight is over this 34%. PR has to win 60% of the fence-sitters to get a simple majority, a very fragile one.

Typical BN vs PR Vote Distribution during General Elections

The BN’s strategy is then very simple – keep the fence-sitters neutral. Either encourage them not vote or get them to spoil their vote. The more the fence-sitters remain neutral, the bigger the advantage for BN. That is all UMNO needs to win as they have a 6% in-built advantage already. (To secure a safe winning margin, Pakatan has to win over more than 75% of the fence-sitters. That is a monumental task.)

4. We can see these strategies at work at PEMANDU and how the spinning is going on.