KINGSTON, Jamaica — Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) leader Dr Andrew Holness is not fazed by polls showing his party is trailing the People’s National Party (PNP), saying he has done his own canvassing which shows the opposite.

“Don Anderson predicted in 2007, 2011, 2016 and 2020, and I’m not going to discredit anybody, but I don’t listen to Don Anderson’s polls. I have done my own [poll], and I have stayed away from saying what the outcome of the poll is. Because you can use polls to influence opinions, which is what has been happening in Jamaica for a very long time. But ultimately, you end up in an echo chamber, where you start to believe what your own polls are telling you in terms of the influence it has on people, and you don’t want that,” Holness told journalists just after he cast his vote at Mona High School in St Andrew Eastern this morning.

Holness said the JLP did its own poll a few weeks before the announcement of the elections – “not a little poll of a thousand people here or three hundred people there…”

“We polled 23 seats, we interviewed over 25,000 respondents, and we polled the seats that have shown historically the ability to swing. And in 20 of those seats, we were significantly ahead,” he said.

He said the Bluedot polls, completed for Nationwide News, which showed the JLP with a 13 percentage point lead over the PNP just ahead of the election, were more in alignment with what the JLP polls were saying.

“We stand here on great conviction with great humility. We’re not bothered by the polls, we have done the work,” he said.

(Videos: Jerome Williams and Llewellyn Wynter)