Binay shrugs off Duterte lead, says Roxas top rival

VICE President Jejomar Binay Monday shrugged off the latest voter popularity surveys showing him and administration standard bearer Mar Roxas trailing the front-runners, declaring that on Election Day the contest would be between him and Roxas because the two have the political machinery to deliver the votes.

“I know I’m going to win,” Binay said in an interview with Radyo Inquirer, which is part of the Inquirer Group of Companies.

Binay, standard-bearer of the United Nationalist Alliance party, said based on the forecast of his chief of staff who predicted his victory in 2010, he would  win by a margin of 4 million votes, or a 7- to 10-percent margin.

He said his core group of electoral supporters comprised 35 percent “more or less” and there were organizations which he said continued to back him.

Binay conceded that he had lost some supporters because of the “demolition by perception” against him in the media, referring to the wide publicity generated in the yearlong investigations in the Senate blue ribbon subcommittee on his alleged ill-gotten wealth when he was mayor of Makati City.

With the May 9 polls less than a month away, Binay said he believed this “second stage of the election campaign” would see Roxas, standard-bearer of the Liberal Party, as his main rival.

He attributed this to Roxas having a big political machinery and organization because the government was footing the bill.

Asked whether this meant Roxas would be his main rival even if the surveys showed that Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte and Sen. Grace Poe were leading in voter survey preferences, he replied that that would be the case “at the end of the day.”

He called this “practical politics.” He said Duterte and Poe had no political organization and were just now getting support from political leaders “since they first built their image in the media.”

“They are now scrambling to organize,” he said.

Asked what he will be doing in the next four weeks, Binay said he would continue to reach out to voters and explain why they should vote for him.

Despite the benefit of a big machinery, two former speakers of the House of Representatives—Jose de Venecia and Ramon Mitra—failed in their presidential runs in 1998 and 1992, respectively.

Mitra, the standard-bearer of the then ruling Laban ng Demokratikong Pilipino, and De Venecia, the standard-bearer of the then ruling Lakas-NUCD, were each trounced by candidates from fledgling parties.

In 1992, Mitra, who was the administration’s candidate, was routed in the polls after he was junked by his own party mates in the local level in favor of his chief rival, Fidel V. Ramos of the then little-known Partido Lakas ng Tao that later became Lakas. Ramos won that balloting.

In 1998, De Venecia lost to Joseph Estrada’s Partido ng Masang Pilipino. Days after the elections that year, De Venecia said he believed the Lakas-NUCD machinery worked during the elections. The administration party machinery, however, was no match to the vote-buying and cheating that—some people suspected, including De Venecia—other candidates had resorted to. With a report from Inquirer Research