General Election Forecast: Kandy District

Kandy is the 2nd largest city and the last capital of the ancient kings' era of Sri Lanka. Kandy electoral district is home to 1,129,100 registered voters and they elect 12 of the 225 members of the Sri Lankan Parliament.

Past elections

Kandy is a district that leans in UNP direction in past elections. In the 2015 general election, UNFGG was able to win the district with 55.57% of the votes. It gave them 7 seats. However, In 2010 SLFA won Kandy district with 8 seats to 4. JVP usually has around 4% support in Kandy which is not sufficient to win a seat from a district. In the recent presidential election in 2019, Gotabhaya Rajapaksha won Kandy with 50.43% voter support. He got 471,502 votes in his favour in that election.****

General Election 2020

Numbers.lk conducted a national online poll between 20th July to 27th of July of 2020. We got 1,844 responses overall and 177 of them are from Kandy district. Since it’s an online poll it’s difficult to achieve the random sampling of demographics an election poll requires. Since the poll is not a random sample of the population of Sri Lanka; we used the swing of voters from one party to another from the presidential election to the general election to forecast the outcome of the election.

According to our projections, here are the final forcast of results in Kandy district,

Key Takeaways:

• SLPP will win the district with 7 seats. SJB will win 4 seats, NMPP end up winning 1 seat.
• Every big name form UNP is contesting under SJB in Kandy district this time around, therefore it seems like UNP won’t be able to win a seat from Kandy.
• Introduction of KD Lalkantha to Kandy district from NMPP seems like a smart move. Our poll suggests he has a very good chance of winning a seat.
• Dilum Amunugama and Lakshman Kiriella are leading the preferential votes race respectively in SLPP & SJB.

Read More:

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