COMMENT | Pakatan Harapan is putting up a brave fight to retain its hold on the Negeri Sembilan state assembly when the voters in the state cast their votes on Aug 1.

Even though Harapan has been in control of the state legislature for two terms (from 2018 to 2023 and from 2023 to the recent dissolution of the state assembly), it has never had dominant control of the state assembly.

Table 1 below shows that Harapan won only 53 percent of the popular vote and 20 out of 36 state seats in the 2018 general election when Bersatu was still part of the coalition and Malay support then was above 20 percent.

In the 2022 general election, Harapan’s vote share fell to 44.4 percent and if we use the results from the 2022 GE to calculate the results for the state seats, Harapan would only...