IHP’s Sri Lanka Opinion Tracker Survey (SLOTS) MRP provisional estimates of Presidential Election voting intent in Mar. 2024 show support for SJB leader Sajith Premadasa increasing to 41% (+2), reducing the gap with NPP/JVP leader AK Dissanayake who leads on 44% (-2). Support was little changed for Pres. Ranil Wickremesinghe at 8% (unchanged), and a generic SLPP candidate at 7% (-1). 

Dr. Ravi Rannan-Eliya, director of the SLOTS poll, commented that a large uptick in support for Mr Premadasa in recent interviews is making the MRP model increasingly favour the possibility of a more general upward trend. But he cautioned that it would be best to wait one or two months to see if this was just noise in the polling or an actual trend. 

These estimates use the IHP SLOTS Multilevel Regression and Poststratification (MRP) model (01/2024 revision). This update is for all adults and uses data from 16,671 interviews conducted from Oct. 2021 to 21 April 2024, including 527 interviews during Mar. 2024. 100 bootstraps were run to capture model uncertainty. Margins of error are assessed as 1–3% for March.

IHP’s SLOTS MRP methodology first estimates the relationship between a wide variety of characteristics about respondents and their opinions – in this case, ‘If there was a Presidential Election today, who would you vote for?’– in a multilevel statistical model that also smooths month to month changes. It then uses a large data file that is calibrated to the national population to predict voting intent in each month since Oct. 2021, according to what the multilevel model says about their probability of voting for various parties (‘post-stratification’) at each point in time. The multilevel model was estimated 100 times to reflect underlying uncertainties in the model and to obtain margins of error.

About IHP

IHP is an independent, non-partisan research centre based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The SLOTS lead investigator is Dr Ravi Rannan-Eliya of IHP, who has trained in public opinion polling at Harvard University and has conducted numerous surveys over three decades. 

Methodology

SLOTS combines interviews from a national sample of adults (ages 18 and over) reached by random digit dialling of mobile numbers, and others coming from a national panel of respondents who were previously recruited through random selection. IHP estimates voting intent using an adaptation of Multilevel Regression and Post-Stratification (MRP), with multiple imputation to account for uncertainties in its modelling, exploiting data from all SLOTS interviews to estimate voting in a particular month. 

The March 2024 MRP estimates are based on 16,671 interviews conducted from 1 October 2021–21 April 2024, including 527 interviews conducted in March 2024. The margin of error is assessed as 2.7–2.9% for AK Dissanayake, Sajith Premadasa and 1.0–1.3% for Ranil Wickremesinghe and the other potential candidate. All estimates are adjusted to ensure the sample matches the national population with respect to age, sex, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, education, geographical location, and voting in the 2019 Presidential and 2020 General Elections.

Funding

The SLOTS survey has previously been funded by the Neelan Tiruchelvam Trust, the UK National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), The Asia Foundation in Sri Lanka, and others. Current fieldwork is financed by the IHP Public Interest Research Fund and others. The sponsors play no role in the study design, analysis, or interpretation of findings. Furthermore, the survey findings do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of past and present funders. Interested parties can contact IHP for more detailed data and results.