John Gitonga Mwaniki Ahead of Other Manyatta Parliamentary Seat Contestants in the Latest Opinion Poll

2017 will be John Gitonga Mwaniki’s year if the latest opinion poll by Embu County News is something to go by. In the poll, voters were asked “Who will you vote for as the MP for Manyatta Constituency 2017?”

The results of the online opinion poll that mainly targeted Facebook users in Embu County, Mwaniki is leading in popularity. By the time of publishing this news story, Mwaniki was leading in the poll having garnered 75.76% of the cast votes. John Muchiri, the current Member of Parliament for Manyatta, garnered 15.15% of the votes while Kinyua Wa Mugo and Engineer Mbogo RN Corado garnered 4.55% each.

It is evidently clear that Embu youths, who are the major Facebook users, are fully behind their fellow youth. The poll comes shortly after the exit of the former Manyatta Member of Parliament, Emilio Kathuri, from the race. Kathuri withdrew from the race to be the running mate of Lenny Kivuti, a gubernatorial candidate in Embu County.

Since making the announcement that he would be contesting for the Parliamentary seat in Manyatta, Mwaniki has been traversing the constituency meeting the people that he wants to represent.

A quick survey by Embu County News shows that Mwaniki has been the most active aspirant at the grass root level. Majority of the electorates in Manyatta admit to having attended a function graced by Mwaniki. Perhaps, this explains the vast margin between Mwaniki and other contestants.

Nevertheless, it’s still early to conclusively say who will become the representative of the people of Manyatta in Parliament come next year.

In the 2013 elections for instance, Raila Odinga was consistently leading in the polls ahead of Uhuru Kenyatta.

However, as we edged closer to the election, Mr. Kenyatta closed the gap in the last two polls and eventually won the heavily contested election with 50.3% of the cast votes.

Similarly, in the just concluded U.S elections, the prediction of the last opinion poll was that Donald Trump would emerge the winner. In the poll, Trump garnered 31% of the cast votes in Iowa though he garnered 24% in the election.

Generally, although opinion polls seem erroneous at the face value, they paint a more damning picture of the reality on the ground. That’s why opinion polls will remain an indispensable feature of any election. Polls are very instrumental in assessing the amount of effort that candidates need to put in their campaign.

Here is the link to the Manyatta Constituency poll- https://strawpoll.de/4sr4r15