QUESTION TIME | To examine the reasons for Bersatu/Harapan's loss in Semenyih, let’s first look at by how much Bersatu lost the Semenyih state seat in the by-election - this is a clear loss because Bersatu held this seat previously. Then it would be easier to look at the reasons that could have contributed to the loss.

There is one vital change from GE14 last May 9 - PAS competed against Umno as well then, but this time only Umno stood against Bersatu. PAS instructed its supporters to vote for Umno. The table above compares like with like - by combining Umno and PASvotes in GE14.

As Harapan should have realised by now, Umno and PAS together are a formidable pair which will, between them, easily obtain more than 50 percent of the Malay votes most of the time. For 2018 (GE14), when we include PAS together with Umno, the margin of victory for Bersatu/Harapan was rather slim...