TOM EATON | Getting into a tizzy on X about where voters are likely to put their X

Earlier this week I tweeted a back-of-an-envelope prediction about the outcome of next week’s election, and immediately saw one outcome I hadn’t predicted.

It’s unwise to try to read minds, but I certainly got the sense from this comment and others like it that the people who wrote them felt attacked, that I had harmed them simply by imagining a different outcome to the one they were imagining

For the sake of full disclosure, my guess (prefaced with the disclaimer that it was “based on nothing but gut”) looked like this:

• ANC: 50%
• DA: 19%
• EFF: 12%
• IFP: 4%
• MKP: 4%
• FF+: 3%
• ActionSA: 2%
• PA: 2%
• Rise Mzansi: 1%
• ACDP: 0.5%
• Bosa: 0.5%

In retrospect I think I might have given the ANC half a percent too many, and it’s possible that MKP and RISE might get a little bit more, but for an informal thumb-suck posted on Twitter, I’m happy to stand by it.

Some, however, were furious. In one respect this wasn’t surprising at all. Twitter (I’m not going to call it X) is a place where people go to have feelings all over other people, and I suppose I had it coming.

But what I did find interesting was those comments I got from people expressing genuine anger that I had dared to imagine a list of numbers that differed from the list of numbers they had imagined.

To be fair, some were fairly good-natured in their criticism of my “gut” response, like Emkay who told me: “Your gut is full of alcohol and biltong.”

Others, however, were clearly lashing out, having apparently had their feelings quite badly hurt.

Kavi, for example, wrote: “So glad our ‘so called journalists’ have backup careers in palm reading.”

Blessness wrote: “I’m sorry to tell you in the face that your gut is useless.”

Shaun went one step further, claiming that: “You undermine Zuma yet again”. (Aside: I don’t want to upset Shaun any more than I already have, but if Zuma can be undermined by one tweet read by 0.09% of the population, then I’m afraid the old man is in much worse shape than we thought.)

The comment that cut to the heart of the issue, however, was one from Chris, who asked: “If the anc [sic] gets below 45%, will you publically [sic] apologise?”

To Chris, it seemed that my suggestion that the ANC might get 50% wasn’t just a disappointing idea. It had felt like something destructive.

It’s unwise to try to read minds, but I certainly got the sense from this comment and others like it that the people who wrote them felt attacked, that I had harmed them simply by imagining a different outcome to the one they were imagining.

I don’t write this to mock people like Chris. Rather, I write it to remind the more jaded among us that there are many South Africans who still take party politics intensely seriously — sometimes a little too seriously — and that a few of them are about to be severely disappointed, not least one particular Zuma supporter who told me that MKP is going to win 67% of the vote.

Then again, if my thumb-suck prediction turns out to be right, I suspect almost all of us are going to be disappointed to a greater or lesser degree. Which, they say, is the sign of a good negotiation. And isn’t that ultimately what democracy is?