Two weeks have passed since the election but I forgot to address one of the "achievements" triumphantly paraded by opposition supporters – namely WP's "victory" in the constituencies it contested against the PAP.
Just like five years ago, the party marginally crossed the 50 percent threshold in the combined vote share across all of these areas – a result its supporters frame as evidence that the election didn’t go quite as well for the PAP. They argue that, if only the WP could contest the entire country, it might even defeat the PAP.
Unfortunately, though not unsurprisingly for the local fans of the opposition, this idea is built on a few fallacies.
Ultimately WP did win 50.04% of all votes in these constituencies. But by focusing on them in an attempt to extrapolate these results onto entire country, the fundamental fallacy is committed – sampling bias.
Sampling bias occurs when you focus on a specific subset of data, that says what you want the entire set to say, and then you draw false conclusions on this basis.
First of all, each constituency is different, so lumping in Aljunied with other battlegrounds ends up adding over 25,000 votes in WP's favour, despite the fact that candidate lineups are incomparable.
Let's remember that the PAP sent a team that the opposition supporters themselves called a "suicide squad", which went against the party's leadership: Pritam Singh, Sylvia Lim and Gerald Giam.
It's as if WP tried moving its team of newbies from Punggol to contest Ang Mo Kio instead, against Lee Hsien Loong, or Marsiling-Yew Tee against Lawrence Wong.
Would the results there be close? I think not.
Here we arrive at what makes this sampling bias so bad – the gulf between quality and quantity.
Quantitatively WP may have won more votes by the numbers but qualitatively it didn't challenge the best PAP candidates.
Using a football analogy – it's as if the starting eleven of Southampton FC beat Liverpool's reserves and claimed they could aim for the championship (instead of being relegated).
There's a reason the Workers' Party ran away from Marine Parade, despite investing two years on the ground there, and contested Punggol GRC instead.
Pritam Singh should run against Lawrence Wong or Lee Hsien Loong. Sylvia Lim could compete with K Shanmugam or even Chan Chun Sing. Only then would we know if they are even remotely in the same league when it comes to popular support.
But they know they aren't, which is why they are still huddling in the safety Aljunied.
They sent Faisal Manap to compete in Tampines GRC and he lost. Yes, not by much, but it's not like minister Masagos is PAP's toughest player and WP has exploited the conflict in Palestine to draw as many Malay voters as possible. And that still wasn't enough.
It's hard to say if PAP could win in Aljunied or Sengkang if it sent frontline ministers there – but one thing we can all be sure is that the results would have been much closer than they were now.
And WP's paper "victory" would soon be a very real defeat.
