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| Candidate posters for the presidential election are posted along a street in Seoul's Jongno District, Wednesday. From the left are Lee Jae-myung of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea, Yoon Suk-yeol of the main opposition People Power Party and Sim Sang-jung of the minor progressive Justice Party. Yonhap |
By Jung Da-min
The two main presidential candidates, Lee Jae-myung of the ruling liberal Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) and Yoon Suk-yeol of the main opposition People Power Party (PPP), were in a neck-and-neck race in opinion polls conducted before March 2.
But the effects of Yoon's unification of candidacies with Ahn Cheol-soo of the minor opposition conservative People's Party, announced March 3, will not be known until the election ends next week.
As the election is set to take place on March 9, opinion polls conducted during the seven days preceding and including it, from March 3 to 9, are banned from release under the Election Law, as they could affect public opinion and distort the free choice of the people's preferred candidate.
According to a survey of 1,002 adults conducted by local pollster Gallup Korea from Monday to Wednesday, 39 percent of the respondents said they support Yoon, followed by Lee at 38 percent.
Ahn Cheol-soo of the minor opposition center-right People's Party, who stepped down to merge his candidacy with Yoon's on Thursday, had garnered 12 percent support in one of the latest polls conducted.
Sim Sang-jung of the minor opposition progressive Justice Party had 3 percent support.
The gap between the two leading candidates, Yoon and Lee, was only one percentage point, falling within the poll's margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, with a confidence level of 95 percent.
In another survey of 1,006 adults conducted from Tuesday to Wednesday by local pollster Korea Society Opinion Institute at the request of local newspaper Herald Business, Yoon won 44.4 percent support among the respondents, followed by Lee at 43.7 percent. Ahn and Sim had 7.2 percent and 1.9 percent support, respectively.
The poll was also conducted right before Ahn and Yoon announced the unification of their campaigns. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, with a 95 percent confidence rate. The gap between Yoon and Lee was only 0.7 percentage points.
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