Although Pakatan Rakyat just lost the Hulu Selangor parliamentary seat to BN, I do not see a swing in voter support from Pakatan towards BN.
Analysing and comparing the results for both the 2008 and yestdray’s by-election, the overall swing (ie, without considering swings of different racial groups) is clearly away from BN towards Pakatan.
Parliament
2008 Total Turnout Spoilt BN Pakatan Majority
voters
H Sgor 63,539 47,622 1,466 22,979 23,177 198
State 2008 Total Turnout Spoilt BN Pakatan Majority
voters
Hulu Bernam 17,549 12,739 318 7,985 4,436 3,549
K K Bharu 18,212 13,211 549 6,555 6,107 448
Batang Kali 27,832 21,673 404 11,724 9,545 2,179
Overall 63,593 47,623 1,271 26,264 20,088 6,176
Parliament
2010 Total Turnout Spoilt BN Pakatan Majority
voters
H Selangor 63,593 49,000 731 24,997 23,272 1,725
I am of the view that the results of the 2008 Hulu Selangor parliamentary elections was an aberration. It did not represent actual voter sentiment in respect of support for BN at that time.
Voters whose loyalty were still with BN continued voting strongly for BN in the state seats, giving the BN a total of 26,264 votes. This translates into an overall majority oh 6,176 votes against the PR's 20,088 votes.
Thousands of those same BN supporters must have found G Palanivel, the BN candidate for the parliamentary seat so abhorrent that they either deliberately spoilt their votes or chose to vote for Zainal Abidin Ahmad, the Pakatan candidate.
BN was aware and obviously still believes that Palanivel is ‘persona non grata’ to substantial numbers of Hulu Selangor voters, the majority of whom are still loyal to BN.
That was the sole reason that there was no way Umno-BN was going to allow Palanivel to stand as the BN candidate. The fact that BN did not allow Palanivel to stand is proof that that BN's loss in the 2008 GE was not the result of ‘split voting’ where voters split their votes to different coalitions for the parliamentary and state seats.
A fair and realistic comparison would be between last Sunday's results with the 2008 state constituencies results. In the 2008 elections for the state seats the results were as follows:-
BN : 26,264 votes : 55.1%
PR : 20,088 votes : 42.2%
Spoilt : 1,271 votes : 2.7%
Yesterday’s results were as follows:-
BN : 24,997 votes : 51%
PR : 23,272 votes : 47.5%
Spoilt : 731 votes : 1.5%
BN's votes decreased 4.1% from 2008's 55.1% to 51%.
Pakatan's votes increased 5.3% from 2008's 42.2% to 47.5%
Basing on the above, BN's claim that yesterday’s by-election results points towards the Selangor electorate's return to BN may be delusory. Conversely Pakatan needs only to engineer an additional 2% swing towards it to win the next election in Hulu Selangor.
