Analysts say DA’s ‘significant shift of black voters’ claim is false

With results increasingly likely to show a downturn in votes for the party, DA national elections manager Jonathan Moakes has said the party may have had “racial nationalists” vote against it this year, but there has been a “significant shift” of black voters to the official opposition.

“Most importantly in this election, the trends are showing us that a significant shift toward the DA has taken place among new voters who align with our values. These are mostly young, black, coloured and Indian South Africans,” Moakes wrote.

News24 has however reported that their elections analyst Dawie Scholtz says this is not the case with only a fractional jump in the party’s black voter support.

“According to his analysis, the DA had the support of 4.9% of black voters’ support in 2014 and 5% this year,” the site explains.

Earlier the DA’s James Selfe had said that it was “inevitable that some of its supporters would leave the party for the Freedom Front Plus after it repositioned itself to not only appeal to minority voters”.

“It’s part of the repositioning of the party and we will have to learn the lessons from this election … We need to engage in certain introspection, we need to see where we lost votes and we need to apply those lessons to the next election campaign,” Selfe explained, indicating he was perhaps not happy with the party’s move away from the more conservative elements within their voter base.

The conservative FF+ has been growing steadily since it first contested the elections in 1999 recording 127 217 votes. With 99.87% of the votes captured the party has this year secured a sizeable 413 889 votes in this year’s elections or 2.38% of the total votes, while the DA has fallen from 22.23% of the vote in 2014 to 20.79% in this one.

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