Yesterday’s election survey by polling firm Research.bm suggests that things are not as gloomy for the United Bermuda Party as the conventional wisdom has suggested.

What the poll, which puts support for the United Bermuda Party at 40 percent and support for the Progressive Labour Party at 36 percent, does confirm is that, as ever, this is an election that will be decided by undecided voters. Given the margin of error of 4.9 percent, it’s a statistical dead heat.

Of course, national polls are one thing and how seats are divvied up in an election is another. As former UBP campaign official David Sullivan pointed out in yesterday’s paper, the UBP faces an uphill climb to secure a majority of seats in the House of Assembly because of the way the constituency boundaries are drawn.

In effect, the constituencies give the PLP somewhere around 14 secure seats while the UBP is probably sure of ten. That means that the PLP need only hold around five marginal seats of the eight-odd it currently has while the UBP needs to win nine, or four more than it now has.

While Mr. Sullivan thinks the UBP cannot get a net gain of more than three seats, this does not necessarily hold up. Based on the last election, at least four PLP seats are highly vulnerable while one or two more may now be up for grabs. A minimum of two UBP seats hang in the balance.

If it is reasonable to assume that a number of PLP voters in 2003 cast their votes on the basis that the party needed more time to show what it could do, the party’s history since then may have caused some chagrin. Leaving aside the Bermuda Housing Corporation scandal, the party has seen two leadership changes and a great deal of unease over candidate selection. Against that, of course, are the achievements of the Government in certain areas.

However, all the signs suggest that Premier Dr. Ewart Brown is attempting to make this election a referendum on his personal leadership. PLP campaign literature designates him as “the main man” and the PLP website, not to mention the Government’s, puts Dr. Brown front and centre.

To some extent, this is no surprise. Dr. Brown, having forced out Alex Scott, who himself replaced Dame Jennifer Smith after an earlier Brown-led coup immediately after the 2003 election, needs his own election mandate. But it is a risky strategy as well. As yesterday’s poll showed, Dr. Brown is divisive and has shown no great interest in building consensus for his Government’ s programmes.

According to the Research.bm poll, voters who view him either very favourably or favourably number 47 percent, while those who view him unfavourably or very unfavourably total 49 percent. Very few people — five percent — haven’t made their minds up. This number is consistent with a separate poll conducted in May by Research Innovations, which showed a 48.4 percent favourable reaction, down from 61.4 percent in March, while 34.3 percent had an unfavourable reaction.

It is not necessarily wise to run a presidential-style campaign when fewer than half of likely voters view you favourably.

Polls, of course, are only a snapshot of voters’ views and events can shift them, sometimes quite rapidly. But Dr. Brown often alienates people — sometimes core supporters, as in the case of the Medical Clinic and the taxi industry — as he pushes his agenda, and these kinds of controversies use up what is usually a finite source of political capital.

Nonetheless, the UBP would be unwise to start celebrating and the PLP would be wrong to despair. Dr. Brown is a wily and unpredictable politician who should never be underestimated and the PLP has two consecutive election victories under its belt. It will be able to point to some achievements, including the long awaited tourism recovery and, finally, some progress on housing as well as a buoyant economy.

Against that, there is voter fatigue, exacerbated by the pre-election “phoney war” and a certain amount of mistrust which has grown in part because of controversies like the Bermuda Housing Corporation but also by Dr. Brown’s tendency to view truth as an elastic concept.