The real story behind impeachment, ICC case, the Senate siege
THE latest Social Weather Stations and Pulse Asia polls have inadvertently revealed the real story behind the impeachment trial against Vice President Sara Duterte that starts in July, that of her father by the International Criminal Court that starts in November, and the increasingly chaotic political warfare now engulfing the Senate.
The surveys showed Sara Duterte as the highest-rated national official in the country. Recent presidential preference surveys indicate that she remains the strongest contender for the presidency in 2028, much ahead of former vice president Leni Robredo by a commanding margin in a hypothetical one-on-one contest.
The simplest explanation is often the correct one. Sara is being targeted because she is the shoo-in for the presidency in 2028. Her father is being persecuted because he remains the most potent political symbol of the opposition to Marcos.
Other than the fact that it is made up of small, uncritical minds, mainstream media can’t, won’t, or refuses to see this because of the reality that it has been designed — even in democracies, as scholars like Noam Chomsky and Antonio Gramsci have demonstrated — to function as the mouthpieces of the ruling elite, in this case dominated by the Marcos gang.
Only if Sara is found guilty by the Senate impeachment court, the penalty for which is a lifetime ban on holding office, can she be stopped from being the president in 2028. (But the Constitution says only nine senators are needed to acquit her. The Senate bloc that have refused to be Marcos’ minions numbers 13.)
The latest SWS survey suggests that despite years of attacks, the Duterte brand remains not only alive but dominant. And that explains the ferocity of the political battles now being waged in the Senate, the angry delirium of little, or bought, minds in media against the Dutertes and the 13 senators who refuse to be Marcos’ puppets. (“The Senate majority bloc is made up of mass murderers and plunderers,” screams the de facto spokesman masquerading as a newspaper columnist of Sen. Risa Hontiveros, who dreams of being president in 2028.)
Stronger
If one compares Sara Duterte’s political standing with that of two of the most prominent presidential aspirants of the past decade — Mar Roxas in 2015 and Jejomar Binay in 2014–2015 — the conclusion is unavoidable. Sara today occupies a far stronger position than either Roxas or Binay did at a comparable distance from a presidential election.
In the latest Pulse Asia survey, fielded in early May 2026, Sara Duterte took 51 percent in a one-on-one matchup against Leni Robredo, who scraped together 41 percent. In the multi-candidate test earlier this year, she stood at 43 percent against a field that could not lay a glove on her — Robredo at 27, Raffy Tulfo at 19. This is not a lead. This is a chasm, and it has been widening, not narrowing, for two solid years.
Pulse Asia’s poll was in effect validated by the Social Weather Stations survey, also done in May, which showed Sara’s satisfaction rating at 54 percent, for a net satisfaction of plus 29. That for Marcos was 33 percent with 49 percent dissatisfied, for a net score of minus 15.
The skeptics’ favorite ghost story is Jejomar Binay. He was at 41 percent in 2014, they say, and he finished fourth. True. And utterly irrelevant — because anyone who actually looks at what happened to Binay learns the precise opposite of the lesson they want to teach.
Binay’s 41 percent was an illusion. It was a ceiling registered before the field had formed, before Grace Poe and Rodrigo Duterte gave voters a live alternative, before anyone had to choose. It was the polling equivalent of being the only restaurant on an empty street.
Competitors
The instant competitors opened their doors, his customers walked out: 33 percent by December 2015, 23 percent by January, and the high 10s by election eve. His support was a mile wide and an inch deep, and the corruption hearings drained even the inch. The Binay collapse is not a warning about frontrunners. It is a warning about soft frontrunners — and that is exactly the distinction the pundits refuse to draw, because the moment you draw it, their whole argument dies.
Pre-election presidential preference: Sara Duterte (toward 2028) vs. Roxas and Binay (2016). Source: Pulse Asia.
Because Sara’s lead has not melted as the field has clarified. It has hardened. In April 2024, more than four years out, she was tied with Tulfo in the low 30s. By early 2026, she had pulled into the 40s in a crowded field and the low 50s one-on-one. Read that trajectory again: She went up as the race came into focus. Soft frontrunners bleed when voters get real choices. Sara gained. You do not get to invoke Binay and then ignore the one fact about Binay that actually matters — that his line went down while hers goes up. That is not a quibble. That is the whole ballgame.
Voters’ Preferences as Election Nears
Presidential preference over each campaign cycle, aligned by months before the vote. Sources: Pulse Asia (ABS-CBN / Stratbase / commissioned surveys), 2014–2026.
Now ask the question the skeptics never ask: Where, exactly, is the collapse supposed to come from? A frontrunner falls when there is a large, restless bloc of undecided and softly committed voters waiting for a reason to defect.
That kind of bloc is the fuel for every late surge in Philippine history. Duterte’s 2016 run lived on it; he was an undefined provincial mayor with room to grow precisely because the country had not yet made up its mind about him.
In the two-way race, the undecideds are down to single digits. The market has cleared. After a stint as education secretary, a term as vice president, a very public war with Malacañang, and the global drama of her father’s arrest and surrender to The Hague, there is not a single Filipino voter forming a fresh first impression of Sara Duterte. Her brand is fully priced in. You cannot surge into a market that has already closed.
And here is the detail that should end the conversation: Mindanao. Sara Duterte commands something like nine in 10 voters there against Robredo’s and Tulfo’s pathetic single digits, and only the willfully naive think that number is going anywhere. The Dutertes are Mindanao’s first family, and the island has voted as a bloc for a decade and shows every sign of doing so again.
What is Tulfo’s “Mindanao”? In the minds of his “Tutok Erwin Tulfo” listeners who were awed by his ferocity in calling middle-level officials like police precinct commanders to task for committing some wrongdoing against lowly victims. But he no longer has that program.
Robredo? Filipinos don’t bet again on losers: Never has there been a presidential candidate who lost and ran again to win.
Vault
The SWS and Pulse Asia surveys are not polls that drift with the news cycle. These point to the vault of locked votes that Sara carries to the starting line before a single campaign ad airs. Binay never had a Mindanao; his Batangas-Isabela base was sentiment, not bedrock, and sentiment evaporates. Sara begins every count already most of the way home, and her opponents begin every count clawing out of a pit.
The pundits will reach, at this point, for the ICC (the International Criminal Court). Surely the trial at The Hague will do what the surveys say it hasn’t. However, the case did not crater Sara’s numbers; it consolidated them. Every move against her father has been absorbed by his daughter’s base and converted into solidarity, into the kind of us-against-the-world fervor that money cannot buy and foreign tribunals cannot dent.
Of course early leads can vanish. The question is never whether they can. The question is why they do — and they vanish for specific, identifiable reasons. A soft base. A movable electorate. A candidate the public hasn’t decided about yet.
Go down that list for Sara Duterte and check the boxes. Soft base? No — a Mindanao bloc welded shut and a national brand fully formed. Movable electorate? No — undecideds are now in the low single digits. Undefined candidate with room to grow against her? No — she is the most defined politician in the country, and the definition has only helped her. She does not have a single one of the vulnerabilities that have ever caused an early lead to collapse. She has, instead, the precise opposite of each.
To bet on Sara Duterte’s decline, you have to bet against the most durable structural fact in Philippine politics — a loyal regional base — and that phenomenon called charisma, which lasts for decades.
For the Marcos, taking Sara out through impeachment is the only way to stop her from being president, and prevent a repeat of his father’s fate — spending the rest of his life either in jail or in Hawaii, and sick.
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The real story behind impeachment, ICC case, the Senate siege
Source: Breaking News PH
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