Legitimate polls show that most Filipinos don’t want Sara impeached

MOST Filipinos oppose the House of Representatives’ move to impeach Vice President Sara Duterte, contrary to a dubious poll’s claim, headlined in front pages of all broadsheets two weeks ago, that “7 out of 10 Filipinos” want her to face a Senate trial.

Out of the four polling firms which delved into this question — three of them the country’s most credible outfits, two of which have been in the business for decades, and are run by professional pollsters — reported thus:

– The poll of the Social Weather Stations (SWS), established in 1985, in June 2025 asked 1,200 respondents “if they were for or against the impeachment of Sara. Some 42 percent said they were against it, while only 32 percent were for it, with the rest reporting they were undecided or don’t know enough of the issue.”

– PulseAsia Research, a breakaway group from the SWS founded in 1999, in February 2025 asked 1,200 respondents if they “agree or disagree with the filing of the impeachment case” against Sara. It found that a roughly similar 45 percent disagreed with the Congress move, while 26 percent agreed.

– The third polling firm WR Numero, founded in 2020, reported on April 7, 2026, that based on its poll of 1,500 respondents undertaken in March, 53 percent of Filipino adults disagreed with the impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte, while 32 percent agreed with it.

The outlier polling firm claiming the opposite of these firms’ poll results is OCTA Research, whose March 2026 poll claimed 69 percent of Filipinos support Sara’s impeachment and only 28 percent oppose it.

However, OCTA asked the same question that is vastly conceptually different from that of the three other polls: “Do you think Vice President Sara Duterte should face trial in the Senate or an impeachment court to address the allegations against her or not?”

The deviousness of the question bolsters my suspicion that this OCTA outfit has been recruited to the Marcos regime’s desperate attempt to cling to power.

The question is formulated in such a way that it presumes that impeachment is the only way for Sara to prove her innocence: without impeachment, she cannot prove her innocence.

Even those believing in Sara’s innocence and supporting her as the next president would therefore answer in the affirmative, which allows the unscrupulous pollster to spin the conclusion that became front-page stories headline as “7 out of ten Filipinos want Sara impeached.” The ordinary usage of the term “impeached” is pejorative: If I say “I want Marcos impeached,” the message is that I’m convinced that he is guilty of serious crimes that he should be removed through the process of impeachment. It is not, as OCTA cleverly formulated its question, “I want Marcos impeached so he can prove his innocence.”

That poll that produced the false narrative that most Filipinos want Sara impeached is the “air cover,” the propaganda operation to provide the false justification for Marcos’ servants in Congress to pursue her impeachment and get the Senate to undertake a useless trial, scandalous at this time when the country is facing an economic crisis. I explained in a recent column (“Impeachment vs Sara: An insane, inutile fixation,” April 13, 2026) that the Senate impeachment court will 100 percent acquit her since there is no way for it to get the required 16 votes of the senators to convict her.

Second time

This is the second time this OCTA undertook such a poll using the same question and therefore yielding similar results. The first was in April 2025 when it claimed its poll showed 80 percent of Filipinos want Sara impeached. OCTA ignored my critique without trying to debunk it. (See “Our pollsters have become cheap, shameless propagandists,” July 2, 2025).

I have to conclude therefore that from a respected outfit that tracked the course of Covid-19 pandemic in 2021, OCTA Research appears to have degenerated, wittingly or unwittingly, into a propaganda weapon against Sara in the Marcos camp’s desperate attempt to impeach her out of office — which carries the penalty of being permanently banned from holding any public office.

With all polls showing Sara to be a shoo-in for the presidency in the 2028 elections — with the runner-up, the former broadcaster Sen. Raffy Tulfo, coming in a far second — impeachment is the only way to stop her from capturing power. That also leads to a commonsensical or very logical question that should demolish the OCTA poll results. Why would 70 percent of Filipinos want her impeached when most of them already believe she has not committed any crime, as attested by the fact that she has, going by the latest poll, a 59-percent approval rating, and that they will vote for her as president in 2028?

The situation is further complicated by the fact that a substantial portion of respondents admit they do not know enough about the charges to form a firm opinion. The WR Numero survey, for instance, found that nearly half of respondents were unaware of the evidence against Sara Duterte. This suggests that public attitudes are tentative, making them particularly susceptible to framing effects. In such a context, the responsibility of pollsters is not merely to measure opinion, but to do so with clarity and precision. Ambiguity in question design can easily translate into ambiguity — or worse, distortion — in public understanding.

Explanation

If OCTA or even the other four pollsters really want a more accurate assessment of how Filipinos view the Sara impeachment, they should preface their questions with an explanation of what the impeachment process entails and what the charges are. Professional pollsters require these: If the client says it would be expensive to add those additional steps, the pollster would refuse to undertake the poll, since they know the poll would lead to a false reading of people’s sentiments.

They should also have asked two simple questions that they could tack on the questionnaire with little cost: “Do you think Sara is innocent of the impeachment charges?” and “Do you think the impeachment is actually a plot to prevent Sara from running for president in 2028?” I’m quite sure most Filipinos will say “yes” to both.

Who would be more credible — SWS and PulseAsia founded in 1985 and 1999, respectively, and run by professional, much respected pollsters, or OCTA, which took off only with the 2021 pandemic?

OCTA doesn’t even seem to have a professional pollster: Ranjit Singh Rye, who is the sole face of OCTA, is a political science assistant professor, not a pollster, which involves an entirely different discipline. OCTA’s other face, at least during the Covid-19 pandemic, is Guido David, who holds a PhD in biomedical engineering and an MS in applied mathematics. What makes OCTA a suspicious outfit is that it doesn’t even report its officers and board of directors on its website. I suspect it has become Mr. Rye’s one-man operation, contracting fieldwork operators (as most polling firms do) to do the survey, after determining what the poll questions are and analyze the results.

I asked Mr. Rye who or what entity funded the OCTA poll. He said no one, that it is not a commissioned poll. The salary of two UP academics financed a poll that would cost at least P1 million, without any benefit to them? C’mon. I suspect the contents of certain maletas funded it.

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Legitimate polls show that most Filipinos don’t want Sara impeached
Source: Breaking News PH