When Pulse Asia released its latest Ulat ng Bayan this July, one could almost anticipate the following day’s headlines: Vice President Sara Duterte leads the 2028 presidential race at 49 percent. That’s a horse-race reading, inviting the reader to see if her ongoing impeachment trial would affect her viability as a presidential candidate. It is not so much wrong as shallow.
The same numbers, read with more attentiveness, show something more interesting: the profile of a voting formation that the Dutertes have been able to tap and represent. I will describe that formation, and the structure that sustains it, in a separate column. For now, I will try to show its survey footprints.
The first is that Sara Duterte’s 49 percent is not spread evenly across the country. It’s concentrated at 87 percent in Mindanao and 53 percent in the Visayas. It remains substantial but tapers down to 39 percent in Metro Manila and 31 percent in the rest of Luzon. It is strongest among the so-called D and E classes and weakens as one moves toward the cities and the college educated.
Now take a look at Sen. Bong Go’s numbers, cast as vice president in the same survey. He leads the field at 27 percent nationwide. He’s strongest in Mindanao at 47 percent and the Visayas at 30 percent, weakest in Metro Manila and the rest of Luzon. This is exactly Sara’s voting profile in miniature. They draw their constituency from the same regions and the same classes in the same proportions.
The second thing worth noting is the gap between their numbers. Sara, at the top of the presidential lineup of six potential candidates, commands 49 percent. Go, in the vice-presidential slot, commands 27. The base recognizes him as one of its own, as shown by his dominance in Mindanao, but he gets only about half of what she commands as the principal. This base is transferable, then, but only in part: whoever inherits it gets its shape, not necessarily its size. And the gap between the two is precisely where an election might be won or lost.
The third feature is probably the most telling. Pulse Asia tested Sara against five different sets of rivals. She led all five, her share of the votes rising rather than declining as the field changed: 51 percent against Naga City Mayor Leni Robredo and Sen. Raffy Tulfo, 56 against Sen. Erwin Tulfo and Sen. Risa Hontiveros, 57 against Erwin Tulfo and Sen. Bam Aquino, and 52 to Robredo’s 39 in a straight one-on-one.
If Sara’s level of support were shaped by an issue or by revulsion toward a particular rival, her numbers should move depending on who she is pitted against. Hers do not. They appear bonded to her, rather than determined by the identity of her opponent. That, to me, points to a constituency that has already decided what it wants and is merely scanning the field for the nearest candidate who can supply it.
It would be tempting to credit the magic of the Duterte name. But a June 2024 survey by the polling firm Tangere that listed ex-President Rodrigo Duterte showed him drawing no more than 11.8 percent if he ran for vice president in 2028. This is not simply because his popularity had waned; it is that the base did not follow him into a candidacy with nowhere to go. It attaches itself not to a surname, but to a surname that can still run and win. A candidate who is no longer electable draws almost nothing; one who remains so can draw 49 percent as principal, or 27 through a substitute like Go.
A brief caution is in order here about socioeconomic classes, i.e., the familiar A, B, C, D, E categories we encounter in these surveys. As the survey firms themselves admit, respondents are not selected for being Class D or Class E. They are chosen because their barangay and household came up in a geographic draw. Only afterward are they assigned a class, largely by looking at their dwelling. The socioeconomic categories are, to put it bluntly, more a rating of houses than an independent measure of stratification. Furthermore, by the firms’ own education data, the top ABC band tends to be assigned a larger share of the sample than its actual size in the country warrants.
I would be wary of using these preelection surveys as predictors of a race that’s still two years away. But as a snapshot of the society taking the poll, they are unexpectedly graphic. What we are seeing is a single constituency, fixed in its geography and its class, i.e., Mindanao and the Visayas, the D and E of the country’s economic life, and the urban poor of the capital. It reveals itself wherever a viable candidate credibly embodies the kind of authority it is looking for.
The impeachment trial may strike Sara Duterte from the 2028 ballot. But it will not dissolve the voting formation whose footprints the Pulse Asia survey measured for us. What kind of political demand that formation expresses is well worth knowing—even if, at any given moment, it is hard to say who will personify it most effectively.
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