This was a response to a question about math. Ellen can win a run off with just the Liberty party's support but would Brumskine throw his lot in with the Unity Party? Attorney-at-law Kpargoi is a former Brumskine campaigner and a great analyst of Liberian politics. The news of the opposition boycott this morning means this may be a bit dated. Perhaps not.
I was on Brumskine's campaign team in 2005. At the time he refused to support Mrs. Sirleaf. That decision was a political blunder. She was gunning for a one term presidency and was prepared to get into an agreement with him to guarantee her support for him at these polls. He refused on grounds that God had told him that he was going to win the 2005 election. His thinking was that if he gave his support to her, he would be going against God's wishes which could spell disaster for him. What he didn't factor into his equation was that most people who supported him had Ellen as their alternate candidate.
He and I broke up over my decision to support Mrs. Sirleaf in the runoff of those elections. At the time I was the chairman of the Friends of Brumskine (FOB). FOB was the backbone of the Brumskine campaign, but getting closer to the elections in 2005, he distanced himself from the group in favor of Christian pastors. He wanted to run a George Bush style religious campaign in Liberia.
If there's a runoff, a scenario which is increasingly appearing unlikely, Brumskine might decide to go either way. But I don't know whether it would really matter.
The candidates that are not in the next round would have very little say in what happen to the votes of the people who voted for them. My assumption is that most of those voters would stay away, and that's a scenario that further favors the UP.
George Weah isn't the second choice candidate of many people. He has a relatively fixed constituency. People who wont vote for him in the first round of any election, aren't likely to vote for him in a runoff!
My reading in the whole thing is that a runoff favors Mrs. Sirleaf. My conclusion stems from what played out in 2005. At the time Prince Johnson won the senatorial seat in Nimba with a very huge margin. In the runoff he threw his lot with the CDC and even campaigned for them. But the Nimba people comprehensively voted against the CDC in those elections.
The CDC's highlighting of Mrs. Sirleaf's support for the NPFL is something that would never play well in Nimba, especially as it is viewed there as a party that favors bring Samuel Doe's people back to power.
Both parties would be involved in a lot of negotiations, but the UP might be in a stronger position even if they don't get the backing of any of the major losers for reasons I've mentioned above.
In my earlier mail, I indicated that there might be no runoff vote. In addition to information I've received from sources on the ground, an analysis of the trend of the current results, in the context of the 2005 results shows that Mrs. Sirleaf has actually made strong gains across the country. She's won comfortably in counties that she was soundly defeated in last time out.
