S1L9 – Quantifying the Enormous Voting Strength of MCO Power
This is an interesting number to ponder: 138,000.
That’s the number of member-consumer-owners (MCO’s) of BENECO as of the end of September 2021.
Baguio City has 164,125 registered voters. In other words, there are only 26,125 more registered Baguio voters than BENECO members.
If you were running for a seat in the City Council and were foolish enough to antagonize all the BENECO MCO’s, don’t count on this 26,125 non-antagonized differential saving your ambition. Based on the final tally for the City Council race in the 2019 election, that number is only good enough to carry you to EIGHTEENTH place—well outside the Magic 12.
In 2019, Philian Weygan-Allan needed 32,158 votes to secure the last berth in the 12-seat Council race.
Before I get deeper into these hypothetical metrics, I have to acknowledge of course that NOT all the 138,000 MCO’s are Baguio residents or Baguio voters. BENECO’s franchise area covers all 13 municipalities of Benguet, plus Baguio City.
Consumption-wise, Baguio City draws almost 70% of BENECO’s total service load. Since there’s a direct co-relation between consumption and CONSUMER, any campaign strategist would be prudent to assume that at least 70% too, or 96,000 of these 138,000 MCO’s vote in Baguio. You can argue with me about that till the cows come home. But if you fancy yourself as a campaign strategist advising a candidate, take my advice: don’t traffic in self-soothing optimism; instead do the math using the worst assumptions.
That said, it would be a spine-chilling eye-opener for many candidates if I tell them that the “best individual performer” in the 2019 elections—the one candidate who got the most votes for any position across the ballot—was Nacionalista Party Congressional candidate Mark Go. And he only tallied 58,409 votes.
Even No. 1 Councilor Joel Alangsab (PDP-Laban) only tallied 51,062 votes in 2019
Even more astounding is the fact that NPC dark horse candidate Benjie Magalong topped the mayoralty race by just bagging 41,207 votes.
Mark Go and Benjie Magalong were buoyed up mainly by the fact that people did not see them as traditional politicians (although personally I never believed there was any other kind). Still, the common fact of the absence of any scandal to stain their names meant that the voter support profile of these two men was identical. Those who voted for Magalong most likely voted for Mark Go, too. The reason Go has more votes is because he had a three-year headstart in grassroots cultivation, being a second termer and he wasn’t running head-to-head against Magalong who was sprinting on a separate lane.
But if you add Mark Go’s 58,409 votes to Magalong’s 41,207 you come up with 99,616 which is tantalizingly close to that 96,000 number of BENECO MCO’s likely voting in Baguio.
The point is, there are enough postulates to support a theory that the silent unassuming BENECO MCO community packs a voting wallop few political parties realize. On any other uneventful year when affairs at BENECO are boring and unengaging, this silent bailiwick is too loosely coalesced to be a force to reckon with, true that. But in 2021 the threat of disenfranchisement has given these MCO’s a unifying cause, heat-bonding them to resist a common enemy. Suddenly this long-underrated demographic group—the Empowered Consumers–can jell overnight and deliver a 96,000-vote block if it is minded to. Doubters and skeptics will frown but these political smart alecks full of themselves can only ignore the potency of this community at their own peril.
In this slowly-heating season of campaigns, there will be powerbrokers left and right. Every manner, shape and form of “Iglesia” will boast of their “solid 30,000” or their “committed 50,000” yada yada.
In all cases, of course, it will be a blind leap of faith. One church of jumping worshippers says they have 15,000 members who sing, clap AND vote in unison. But you take one look at their temple’s floor area and you can’t figure out how 15,000 can squeeze inside a space no bigger than a basketball court—unless they have double- or triple-decker pews.
That’s the problem with statistics. It’s just like the string bikini which reveals the suggestive by concealing the vital. More often than not, the true ability of a bailiwick to deliver votes is inversely proportional to the loudness of its boasting.
Not so in the case of these 96,000 Baguio-voting MCO’s. How do you verify that number? Just stand somewhere high enough where you have a panoramic view of the city at night (SM’s Skygarden would be ideal). Now imagine that living in every one of those lighted houses is at least ONE BENECO MCO and—there you go—you have visual confirmation.
The COVID19 pandemic has changed the dynamics of campagning in this coming election, too. Do you think the decreasing COVID19 infection rate is really what informed the government’s decision to start relaxing quarantine restrictions almost overnight?
I wasn’t born yesterday. I happen to think it’s the response to urgent concerns by political parties for the Interagency Coordinating Task Force to start loosening the restraints on public gatherings. This is to allow political candidates to return to their natural habitat during campaign periods—the so-called “KBL” triple occasion of KASAL, BINYAG and LIBING.
But if politicos wisen up in time, that middle letter “B” in that habitat acronym will start standing for “BENECO vigils.”
The author is a writer and lawyer based in Baguio City, Philippines. Former editor of the Gold Ore and Baguio City Digest, professor of journalism, political science and law at Baguio Colleges Foundation (BCF). He is a photographer and video documentarist. He has a YouTube channel called “Parables and Reason”