A new opinion poll from Realfield indicates that 45 per cent of Kenyans would vote for William Ruto to be President compared to 40 per cent for Raila Odinga.
Kalonzo Musyoka and Musalia Mudavadi both had 4 percent support. Another 7 per cent of respondents said they were undecided.
The poll was conducted between December 28 and 31 in all 47 counties. The stated margin of error was 0.81 per cent.
The poll was weighted for age, gender and education.
The poll was apparently undertaken by over 500 field staff doing face to face interviews.
There were 21,697 'voluntary respondents' which would make it the biggest publicly released political opinion poll ever undertaken in Kenya.
The poll was sponsored by the Kenya Muslims National Advisory Council which strongly supported the BBI initiative.
One expert estimated that a 22,000 person face-to-face survey could cost Sh30 million and it is not known if the Council could afford that.
The normal freelance field staff used by research companies apparently did not work on this survey.
The Realfield poll showed that Ruto's strongest county was Bomet where he had 95 per cent support and his weakest county was Homa Bay where he had 3 per cent support.
The poll showed that Raila's strongest county was Migori where had 93 per cent support and his weakest was Bomet where he had 4 per cent support.
On party preferences, 43 per cent backed UDA; 37 per cent ODM; 7 per cent Undecided; 3 per cent Wiper; and 3 per cent Jubilee.
Realfield was set up in April 2020 by Donald Patrick Bray and Jonathan Moss as the sole shareholders. Bray, 51 years old, and is about to complete his PhD from Cambridge University. He previously worked as a security consultant in Afghanistan.
Bray has another company called Chalkstone Mosaic that has used artificial intelligence to advise mining companies in Afghanistan, Peru, Sri Lanka and Colombia. Chalkstone has worked in Kenya since 2014.
Jonathan Charles Moss, 57 years, also worked as a security consultant in Afghanistan. He is not thought to be connected to Dr Jonathan Moss, the Managing Director of Kisima Farm in Timau.
Realfield's slogan is 'Ethical Data. Real Time'. It is not registered as a pollster with the Marketing and Social Research Association and it is not known what research it has carried out in Kenya or elsewhere.
"We are a UK registered company and a startup that launched here in Kenya in March 2021. Amongst our customers are the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, the US company Tetra Tech and we have delivered data to the Kenya Red Cross in support of their efforts to understand the nature of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in Kenya. As a platform, we are very comfortable with large datasets and this is our first electoral poll in Kenya," Bray told the Star last week.
Some questions were also raised about the sample sizes. For instance, there were 482 respondents in Wajir and 337 in Nairobi.
"The explanation rests in both the art and science of data collection," Bray explained, "Some counties reported higher figures as a result of offline working, while a couple reported lower numbers due to weather conditions, for example. We then weighted by age, gender and geography as per the 2017 IEBC Voter Registration list to achieve the national level result."
