3 takeaways from Nigeria's 2023 Presidential election

Mar 01, 2023|Michael Famoroti

Earlier this morning, the Independent National Electoral Commission declared Bola Ahmed Tinubu as the winner of the 2023 Presidential Elections, marking the end of arguably the most important and hotly contested presidential election Nigeria has seen for 50 years.

You can find comprehensive results from the Nigerian general elections at stears.co/elections, including:

Presidential results at state-level
Presidential results at local government level (still being updated)
Senate results
House of Representatives results

Here are three key takeaways from Nigeria’s 2023 Federal Elections.

#1 A tight race

The presidential race was as close as expected. Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the winning candidate, accumulated 8.8 million votes, just 1.8 million votes ahead of Atiku Abubakar in second and 2.7 million votes more than Peter Obi. In contrast, President Buhari won the 2019 Elections by nearly 4 million votes.

Furthermore, each of the top three candidates won twelve (states), showing how split voter preferences are across Nigeria. One clear edge the APC candidate can boast of is that he secured at least 25% of the vote in 29 states, making him the most universally popular candidate. Meanwhile, although Peter Obi came within a million votes of Atiku Abubakar, he reached 25% of the poll in fewer states (16 vs 21), suggesting his popularity was slightly more concentrated.

#2 Stears accurately predicts the 2023 presidential election winner

Our pre-election poll and prediction model has proved prescient now that the results are in. The basic Stears poll put Peter Obi ahead with 27% of the vote, compared to 15% for Bola Ahmed Tinubu and 12% for Atiku Abubakar.

However, the high level of silent voters (37%) prompted us to question the reliability of a poll with such a high number of undeclared voters. To solve this problem, we built a first-of-its-kind electoral prediction model to identify who these silent voters intend to vote for, inferred from the rest of the polling data they reported.