Yoon 41.9% · Lee 40.5%... Unification and TV Debate Variables, Lee Catches Up

A Neck-and-Neck Race Within the Margin of Error... Notable Changes in Ahn Cheol-soo's Support Following Withdrawal from Unification

Realmeter-OhmyNews / Survey conducted from the 20th to the 23rd (95% confidence level with a margin of error of ±2.2%)

[Asia Economy Reporter Baek Kyunghwan] In the multi-candidate virtual race for the next presidential election, Yoon Seok-yeol, the candidate from the People Power Party, and Lee Jae-myung, the candidate from the Democratic Party of Korea, have once again begun to show an extremely close contest. This reflects the withdrawal of Ahn Cheol-soo, the candidate from the People’s Party, from the unification proposal and the results of the first legal TV debate among the four candidates from both ruling and opposition parties. In recent polls, Lee, who had fallen outside the margin of error, appears to have caught up with Yoon.

On the 24th, Realmeter conducted a poll commissioned by OhmyNews from the 20th to the 23rd on the support rates for the four-candidate virtual race for the next presidential election. Yoon recorded 41.9%, Lee 40.5%, Ahn Cheol-soo 6.8%, and Sim Sang-jung from the Justice Party 2.6%.

A notable point is the significantly reduced gap between Yoon and Lee. The gap between the two candidates is 1.4 percentage points, within the margin of error (±2.2%), which is much narrower than the 4.2 percentage points gap (Yoon 42.9% vs. Lee 38.7%) recorded in the poll conducted over five days from the 13th at the same location.

This survey reflected both variables: Ahn’s announcement on the 20th to withdraw his unification proposal with Yoon and the first legal TV debate on the 21st. In particular, political analysts’ predictions that the failure of unification between Yoon and Ahn and Yoon’s poor performance in the TV debate would help increase Lee’s support rate were partially accurate.

Looking at the daily aggregated results (about 1,000 people) during this period, Yoon and Lee recorded 42.2% and 39.5%, respectively, in the survey conducted just before the unification announcement (on the 18th), but on the 21st, the figures were 41.8% and 40.0%, narrowing the gap. The day after the TV debate, on the 22nd, Lee even overtook Yoon with 41.8% to 40.4%. During the same period, Ahn’s support rate also showed noticeable changes. Before the withdrawal announcement, he recorded 6.6%, which rose sharply to 7.3% on the 21st. After the TV debate, it adjusted back to the mid-6% range, showing that Ahn’s support rate responded immediately to the unification variable.

The gap between Yoon and Lee also narrowed in the survey on the likelihood of winning the next presidential election. Yoon fell by 1.0 percentage point from the previous week to 48.4%, while Lee rose by 1.9 percentage points to 43.2%. Ahn dropped by 1.0 percentage point to 2.0%, and Sim rose by 0.3 percentage points to 0.9%.

This survey was conducted over four days from the 20th, targeting 2,038 men and women nationwide aged 18 and over, using a mixed method of wireless telephone interviews (40%) and wireless (55%) and wired (5%) automated responses. For other details, please refer to the Central Election Survey Deliberation Commission website.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.