‘Duterte bump’: Time for tactical voting?
At the end of 2018, we came up with a new strategy: tactical voting. By this method we hoped to destroy United Russia’s monopoly on power, which had never been done before,” Alexei Navalny wrote in his memoir, “A Patriot” (2024). The candidate from the Kremlin’s party, “United Russia,” usually managed to capture power even if it garnered a relatively small plurality of “at least 25 to 30 percent of the vote” since the rest of the vote was largely split among members of the loyal opposition. Thus, Putin’s regime managed to dominate elections while projecting a semblance of competitive plurality.
Navalny’s burgeoning opposition movement came up with an ingenious strategy to turn the table. “So if the politicians are unable to agree among themselves, let the voters agree. The idea was that we would select the second-strongest candidate and call on everyone to vote for him or her, putting aside ideological differences,” Navalny argued. “My next argument was that the more non-United Russia delegates there were in the parliament, the bolder these candidates would be.”
By combining personal charisma, herculean determination, and state-of-the-art analytics, Navalny had put up a good show in his earlier electoral quest for, first, the top position in Russia’s capital in 2013 and, a few years later, for the presidency itself. After getting banned from running for office, he put all his energy into supporting progressive candidates and in some dramatic cases, even members of the “loyal opposition” in order to weaken Putin’s “monopoly on power.”
Crucially, he also harnessed legitimate grievances in geographically distant and historically marginalized regions of the country. By shifting the electoral momentum through “tactical voting,” which severely undercut the Kremlin’s domination-through-plurality strategy, Navalny managed to create an unusual coalition of genuinely progressive and increasingly adventurous former quasi-insiders. His “tactical voting” strategy proved so effective that the regime eventually decided to take Navalny out.
Thankfully, the Philippines is not Russia. Ours is still an electoral democracy, albeit a deeply flawed one. But there are profound lessons we can learn not only from Navalny’s heroic journey but also from his political acumen.
All authoritative surveys in the past week have shown a singular pattern: a surge in “sympathy votes” for supporters of the former president. Rodrigo Duterte will most likely spend the rest of his life under the aegis of the International Criminal Court, but his support base at home is crystalizing behind sympathetic figures. Duterte’s former “errand boy” and chief consiglieri has topped all recent senatorial surveys, while the former chief executor of the “drug war” is now comfortably among the top five candidates. Incredibly, even former actor Philip Salvador is now within the “Magic 12” in at least one major survey.
The “Duterte bump” is real, but it could only become transformative if the rest fail to coalesce into a robust counterforce. Not too dissimilar from Putin’s electoral base, the Duterte base constitutes, at most, a small plurality of voters. Thanks to their massive resources, machinery, and name recall, the bulk of pro-administration candidates are expected to secure seats in the next Congress.
But here comes the rub: unless genuine opposition candidates make it to the next Senate, it’s hard to see how things could dramatically transform. So far, former senators Francis “Kiko” Pangilinan and Paolo Benigno “Bam” Aquino got an excellent chance at entering the Magic 12. But progressive forces will have to ensure that other pro-Duterte candidates don’t make it. Does this mean “tactical voting” in favor of some of the less dominant pro-administration candidates, whose hearts may be in the right place should the decisive moments arrive in the incoming Senate?
From a very young age, I started taekwondo and worked my way all the way up to black belt—just to realize, in my 20s, that I had barely mastered a single dimension of martial arts. I eventually transitioned into boxing and other combat sports to enhance my overall performance even if it had offended my sense of purity and pride since I had to begin from scratch. The lesson was simple: You can never rely on just one area of strength nor can you exclusively lean on past templates. You need to evolve and incorporate new elements into your tool kit. The same principle applies to politics, especially when confronted with a determined and dangerous adversary.
