In a mammoth exercise to determine how South African population groups voted in Election’24, leading polling company Victory Research overlaid SA’s 2022 Census with voter returns from the 23 296 Voting Districts. The results delivered some surprises about the racial diversity of leading political parties. Victory’s CEO, Gareth van Onselen, shared the findings with BizNews editor Alec Hogg.
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Highlights from the interview
Alec Hogg and Gareth van Onselen discuss the voting patterns of different racial groups in South Africa’s May 29th election. Gareth, chief executive of Victory Research, highlights the country’s obsession with race, influenced heavily by its history. Alec notes that in the UK, being foreign is identified by accent rather than appearance, contrasting with South Africa’s racial focus.
Gareth’s research reveals that the Democratic Alliance (DA), while often perceived as a white party, has the most racially diverse support among the top five political parties. However, the DA struggles with a significant black voter turnout. The voter turnout data shows a discrepancy, with 55% of registered black voters participating compared to 75% of white voters. This low turnout among black voters, driven by factors like alienation, contributes to the overall low turnout.
The African National Congress (ANC), MK, and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) are nearly racially homogenous, predominantly supported by black voters. Despite the DA’s diverse potential support base, translating this into actual votes remains a challenge. Gareth explains the complexities in mapping voter racial profiles due to the lack of published data from the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), necessitating methods like overlaying census data.
Gareth notes that the white population in South Africa has grown numerically but decreased proportionally, now around 7.3%. He also highlights the DA’s success in mobilizing minority voters compared to other parties. Despite criticisms, the DA’s ability to attract black voters, though not fully realized in votes, is significant relative to other opposition parties. Gareth suggests that the DA’s future lies in focusing on areas like Gauteng and improving their voter mobilization efforts.
Edited transcript of the interview ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Alec Hogg (00:11.406)
Gareth van Onselen is the chief executive of Victory Research. He has a love for data and unpacking fascinating information, including the subject we’re going to be talking about today: how the various racial groups voted for the political parties of their choice in the May 29th election.
Alec Hogg (00:39.662)
Gareth, it’s amazing that we in South Africa are so obsessed with race. I spent three years in the UK, and the thing that struck me there was that everybody knew I was a foreigner, not because of the way I looked, but because of the way I spoke. In the UK, it doesn’t matter what your skin looks like, you are British if you speak like a Brit. Whereas in South Africa, it seems we still have quite a while until we get to that point. Perhaps it’s our history.
Gareth van Onselen (01:15.177)
Yeah, I think our history plays a big role. Viewing the world through a racial lens is fundamentally built into our DNA, politically or otherwise. It’s going to be quite a long time before the majority of people stop viewing the world in that way.
Alec Hogg (01:37.614)
Well, let’s hope it’s in our lifetime. You’ve done research on how different racial groups voted in the May 29th election. The DA has been accused of being a white party, but it claims it has a good balance between various racial groups. Just as a headline, what did your research show?
Gareth van Onselen (02:11.273)
The findings are numerous, but essentially, the DA does not have a significant amount of black support, though it does have a substantive amount. It has the most racially diverse support base of the big five political parties, the other four being almost entirely racially homogenous.
Alec Hogg (03:03.886)
So the potential for the DA to break that perception of being a white-only party must be huge.
Gareth van Onselen (03:14.505)
Yes, it’s a powerful perception and a fundamental problem for the party. One must differentiate between the number of hard votes the DA got, around half a million on election day, and its potential support. The ability to translate that broader favourable support base into hard votes is the challenge.
Alec Hogg (04:06.542)
Before we go into those half a million black people and other minorities who voted for the DA, how did you get to these conclusions? Where does your data come from?
Gareth van Onselen (04:23.945)
The most important thing is to map the voter’s roll in terms of its racial profile. The IEC does not publish a racial profile of the voter’s roll, so you have to use other methods. It’s complex and detailed, but essentially, you overlay census data onto voting districts to generate a pretty accurate racial profile of the voter’s roll.
Alec Hogg (05:23.47)
Roughly, what is the breakdown of the population groups and the number that have voted?
Gareth van Onselen (06:00.105)
The proportions on the voter’s roll are different from the general population trends. The black majority comprises around 81% of the total general population but only 77% of the voter’s roll. The minority populations are slightly bigger on the voter’s roll due to factors like opposition parties’ ability to register voters and general voter apathy.
Alec Hogg (07:21.614)
I was interested to see that the white population is now down to 7% of all of South Africa. Is that accurate?
Gareth van Onselen (07:29.577)
Yes, that is accurate. The latest data from the 2023 census puts the white population at around 7.3%. While the number of white South Africans has grown by about a million over the last 20 years, the proportion of the total population has shrunk.
Alec Hogg (08:24.174)
Let’s go through some of your graphics. Perhaps we could kick off with the very first one, the core election indicators. Can you see that on your screen?
Gareth van Onselen (08:55.753)
Yes, I can.
Alec Hogg (08:57.23)
Take us through this graph if you would.
Gareth van Onselen (09:00.009)
Sure. The pie charts at the top are a racial profile of the voters’ roll for the last five elections from 2004 to 2024. The dark blue represents the black majority population. The other minority populations are relatively smaller. The most important indicator for 2024 shows the turnout per race group. On the day, 11 million Black South Africans voted, around 55% of the total black registered population, 52% for the coloured population, 61% for the Indian population, and 75% for the white population.
Alec Hogg (10:06.126)
Nearly 10 million black voters who are on the voters’ roll didn’t vote. Is there anything to read into that?
Gareth van Onselen (10:17.481)
Yes and no. They are fundamentally responsible for the generally low turnout. The fact that the Black South African population turnout was 55% set the whole turnout average at around 58%. The reasons they stay away are complex, but one factor is a general alienation.
Alec Hogg (11:19.662)
Fascinating. The ANC itself, and these pie charts, are very reflective of a pretty homogenous, almost one-race party, even though the objective of the ANC is to have a non-racial South Africa.
Gareth van Onselen (11:40.137)
Yes, the ANC, MK, and the EFF are almost entirely racially homogenous. The smaller box shows the election result and the ANC’s racial support. The larger box uses a pre-election survey to show baseline support. Given how dominated these parties are by black voters, there’s almost no difference between baseline and turnout support.
Alec Hogg (12:43.918)
Extraordinary, only six and a half thousand whites voted for the ANC and zero whites voted for MK. Is that possible?
Gareth van Onselen (12:54.185)
Yes, almost all baseline minority supporters didn’t turn out for the ANC, MK, and EFF. Their baseline minority support was tiny, and their turnout was even smaller.
Alec Hogg (13:31.629)
The EFF got four and a half thousand white voters. An interesting point there when we move to the Democratic Alliance, where the pie chart looks very different.
Gareth van Onselen (13:44.137)
Yes, the DA has a fundamentally different chart. It draws the bulk of its support from minority voters. Its baseline support on the national ballot shows that its white support is actually in a minority. On election day, its coloured and black supporters didn’t turn out as much, and its white supporters turned out at an extraordinarily high rate, making white voters the majority on the day. But over time, the percentage of white voters is shrinking.
Alec Hogg (14:49.838)
Let’s look at the overall party support, the summary, which again shows very clearly the differences. The turnout by population group.
Gareth van Onselen (15:04.681)
The DA is very effective at turning out minority voters. The graph shows the percentage to which each party managed to turn out its particular racial support base. The DA is in a different league, both in actual numbers and percentages. It is brilliant at turning out its core base.
Alec Hogg (16:18.862)
What do you mean by turning out voters?
Gareth van Onselen (16:23.593)
On election day, part of a party’s machinery is ensuring that its supporters go to the polls and vote. The better a party is at getting its supporters to the polls, the higher its turnout. It involves a great deal of electoral mechanics, knowing where your voters are, providing transport, and having people driving around to encourage voting.
Alec Hogg (17:15.63)
The DA support has changed in the last 20 years.
Gareth van Onselen (17:22.153)
Yes, the white proportion of the DA’s support base has shrunk over time. From 2004 to 2019, it reduced to less than a minority. The DA didn’t manage to turn out its coloured support to the same degree as before. But over time, the percentage of white voters is shrinking, and the DA is growing in other areas.
Alec Hogg (18:10.446)
That’s interesting because there is antagonism between the DA and the PA, the Patriotic Alliance, which is a colored nationalist party. Did you do much analysis of the PA’s support?
Gareth van Onselen (18:42.697)
Yes, the PA was responsible for some of that. But parties like Good and the Cape Colored Congress, which are entirely colored in support, also hurt the DA. Turnout was a problem across the board, with many coloured supporters opting out completely.
Alec Hogg (19:15.022)
In a way, the 2024 election would be disappointing to the DA because they’d been moving into becoming more of a South African party, and then the white quotient went up significantly in this last election compared with five years ago.
Alec Hogg (20:29.582)
Okay, and perhaps our last table that we could look at now. Could you explain this one to us?
Gareth van Onselen (20:37.449)
Yeah, sure. So this is just every party that’s represented in parliament and the amount of black support they’ve got. Alex, if you actually go two graphs down, one more. Yeah, this is actually more helpful. It’s the same graph, but essentially it excludes the ANC, EFF and MK. And it goes to demonstrate in absolute terms how all these parties fared when it came to black support.
Alec Hogg (20:48.014)
Mm-hmm. This one.
Gareth van Onselen (21:06.697)
The dark bar is your potential black support, your baseline. And then the light blue is the degree to which you turned those up on election day. So, the DA at around 50%, it has basically a million black supporters but only got 500,000. That 500,000 is significant compared to the other nine parties in parliament. It’s more than all of them combined. The DA gets a lot more stick than it deserves. I mean, the IFP is certainly not blamed for not managing to appeal to black voters. The DA has a significant support base among black South Africans and the potential to grow them significantly. It’s doing a better job than the rest of the opposition. So one needs this kind of perspective when analyzing the DA’s results.
Alec Hogg (22:01.230)
This is really interesting. So half a million black South Africans looked beyond race and beyond the view that the DA is a white party as it’s portrayed and went to what it stood for, what it represents. And that is more than all of those other parties, PA, Freedom Front, Action SA, UDM, ACDP. Rasmus Zanzi, that’s pretty low for its share of the black votes and Bozer put together, which I guess tells you something. But this graph where you look at the IFP versus the DA also reflects something very important, I guess.
Gareth van Onselen (22:50.569)
Yes, I mean, that’s exactly it. The IFP is on the left and like the ANC, MK, and EFF, it’s a racially homogeneous organization. Its total support is 3.8%. When you split it up by race, it’s dominated by black South Africans, specifically Zulu speakers in KwaZulu-Natal. But if you look at the DA, its proportion of black voters, which is its second smallest segment, is pretty much on par with the whole of the IFP support. There are about 50 or 60,000 more votes for the IFP, but they’re pretty much on baseline support and actual election day support. They just enjoy entirely different reputations in the public mind. It’s difficult to understand given that the one has no real desire to seek out support in other race groups or provinces, whereas the DA seems to have a broad appeal across all race groups, yet is considered racially exclusive. It’s an odd contradiction.
Alec Hogg (24:07.086)
Fascinating graphs. So if you were consulting to each of the political parties, starting with the DA, because that is the one we focused on a lot due to the perception that it’s a white party, how would you suggest they start changing that to become the ruling party in South Africa, which presumably is what every political party wants to be?
Gareth van Onselen (24:41.321)
Look, I don’t think, at least not in the short term, by which I mean the next five to ten years, that it is possible for the DA to become a government. The DA doesn’t conceive of the world fundamentally in racial terms. It is sensitive to race as a reality but is essentially trying to attract people to a set of values and principles. The market for that isn’t 50% plus in South Africa and won’t be for some time. The DA’s goal needs to be turning favourable people into voters and doing more work. The DA needs to take Gauteng more seriously, get some impactful physical structures, bigger names, and more resources. This is where the future of the DA lies. How it talks to those people is complex, but I don’t think we have time to set that all out right now.
Alec Hogg (26:26.286)
And Gareth, if you look at the smaller parties, I mentioned Rise Mzansi having a relatively small black support base. Action SA and Rise Mzansi in particular, Helen Zille and others in the DA have not been happy with their emergence because they feel it has taken away seats from the Democratic Alliance, which they could have really done with. Are those two parties in particular, and perhaps BOSA as well, contesting in the traditional DA area?
Gareth van Onselen (27:08.393)
Look, those three parties, Action South Africa, BOSA, and Rise Mzansi, all did well in terms of having a diverse support base. They got a significant number of black South African voters. Maybe ASA actually got a majority, around 53% of its voters were black South Africans. The problem is that they got so few voters that it’s hard to determine if that is a long-term trend or just a short-term aberration. Your very first time as a party, you’re going to capture those most enthusiastic about you. The real test is your ability to capture new markets. We need to give them a couple more elections to see if they can maintain those trends. If they can, that’s encouraging. You want to appeal across all racial groups, though it shouldn’t be the primary focus of electioneering. They have the potential to do that, but whether they can do it on scale remains to be tested.
Alec Hogg (28:15.598)
Gareth Van Onselen is the chief executive of Victory Research. I’m Alec Hogg from BizNews.com.
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