Will the ANC receive less than 50% of the vote in the 2024 South African general election?
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Jul 1
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South Africa is holding a general election in 2024. The African National Congress (ANC) has won a majority of the vote in every election since 1994. However, since 2020, some opinion polls have the ANC receiving less than 50% support.

Will the ANC receive less than 50% of the vote in South Africa's 2024 election?

For easy reference, here are the shares of the vote for the ANC from Wikipedia:

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I created a more detailed market

predicts YES

The Wikipedia polling summary in the question description in general puts the ANC at less than 50% (depending on voter turnout).

To build confidence, I looked at two other pieces of data: membership numbers & party finances.

Membership

As of the elective conference in 2022, ANC membership has declined precipitously (https://mg.co.za/politics/2022-12-18-existential-crisis-anc-membership-drops-by-more-than-one-third-in-five-years/). The peak was in 2012 & attributed largely to Jacob Zuma (https://mg.co.za/article/2012-12-17-anc-membership-numbers-soar/). However, membership doesn’t seem very correlated to election outcomes (see below).

And a 50% general election result doesn’t seem out of place. But it’s worth noting that 2007 membership had differences – it was before party membership reforms. Gatekeeping was noted as a particular problem reducing the membership count. It is likely ANC membership has not been this low in 20 years.

Funding

My Vote Counts (https://myvotecounts.org.za/whose-vote-counts/) is an excellent resource summarising [declared] party funding & donations. As of writing, the DA currently leads in the ANC in total funding (declared since 2021). More importantly, the total quantum of ANC funding is far below what it reportedly requires (https://www.news24.com/citypress/news/anc-is-broke-despite-r19-billion-worth-of-donations-and-fundraising-20231203).

While (technical) insolvency doesn’t necessarily mean the party cannot produce election results, it would certainly be a greater campaigning constraint than previous years.

Those two factors make 50% with steep downside seem more likely than any sort of surprise upside due to voter turnout.

predicts NO

@lordparsley Jeez I didn’t know the da had more funding the anc , TIL

@wylderai someone else been watching Wendover? 😉

predicts NO

@JoshuaWilkes yup the big new piece of info I missed was the ANC already got less than 50% in the last municipal elections

bought Ṁ10 of YES

(duplicate post)

bought Ṁ0 of NO

I've put up a large limit for NO at 50% if anyone wants to increase their YES position

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