The People’s National Party’s (PNP’s) huge 13.7 per cent slide in support since last November has placed the ruling party in a statistical dead heat with the Opposition Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), the latest Stone Poll has shown.

According to Stone, when they posed the question ‘If an election were held today with Bruce Golding as the leader of the JLP and Portia Simpson Miller as leader of the PNP, which party would you vote for?’ 28.6 per cent of the voters polled favoured the JLP, while 28.7 per cent favoured the PNP.

The figures represent a two percentage point movement downward for the PNP and a three percentage point movement upward for the JLP from the August poll.

However, when compared to the November 2005 poll when 42.4 per cent of voters said they would cast their ballot for a Portia Simpson Miller-led PNP, the ruling party has suffered serious slippage, while the JLP (30.8 per cent at the time) has remained within the polls’ margin of error of plus or minus three per cent.

At the time the November poll was conducted, Simpson Miller had not yet taken over the leadership of the party and was still the most popular politician in Jamaica.

In fact, she emerged in that survey as the only contender for the PNP leadership who could inspire the PNP to an election victory over the JLP, which had only nine months before been taken over by Golding after Edward Seaga stepped down from the job.

Simpson Miller was elected president of the PNP in February this year and replaced P J Patterson as prime minister on March 30. But she has been unable to maintain the initial groundswell of popular support that greeted her historic ascendancy to the country’s highest elected office.

Infighting in her party and the Trafigura affair have also given the impression that she is not in total control of the PNP.

“The results of the latest Stone Poll show that the PNP is slipping in their popularity among voters,” said the pollsters. “It would appear that the recent Trafigura incident has impacted on voter preferences and perceptions.”

The Stone team conducted the latest poll among 1,473 voters between October 21 and 25, just over two weeks after the JLP revealed that the PNP had accepted $31 million from Trafigura, a Dutch oil firm that holds a contract with the Jamaican Government to lift and sell Nigerian crude for Jamaica on the world market.

The PNP had said that the money was an election campaign donation, but Trafigura later claimed that it was payment on a commercial agreement.

Simpson Miller, the PNP president and prime minister, ordered the money returned, and her information minister, Colin Campbell, resigned.

Campbell, who emerged as the man at the centre of the affair, also quit his job as general-secretary of the PNP, saying that he had not fully informed the party’s officers of the transaction.

The October Stone Poll also found that the Trafigura affair has left voters with less confidence in the PNP (24.3 per cent), 42 per cent of voters said they were not satisfied with the Government’s explanation of the incident, and 51.6 per cent said they would like to get more details about it.

A total of 37.1 per cent of respondents said they disapproved of the way in which Simpson Miller handled the Trafigura incident, 16.8 per cent said they approved, while 28.8 per cent of voters said they disapproved of the way Golding handled the incident and 27.8 per cent approved.

In relation to the October party standings, Stone said they found that the proportion of undecided voters had decreased and those who said that they will not vote have increased by about six per cent.

“In the previous poll, 20.7 per cent of the voters said that they would not vote in the next election. However, this poll reveals that the number has increased to 26.5 per cent,” said Stone.