In 2019, seeing only two people on the non-Duterte side surviving the Senatorial onslaught of #Duterte‘s people, I knew Grace Poe would be the one with a chance of winning 2022 with us.

One day to go to substitutions, and now clear that Sara Duterte is running with Bongbong Marcos, and Rodrigo Duterte is running as VP to Bong Go, I still think the same.

Is it close to impossible? I hear that the answer is yes. Poe is not up to it. Am I writing this essay anyway? Yes. Because lest it be said that no one said it out loud, I would rather be that lone voice that does so.

I am all for hopefulness, but I was never one for blindness.

What we want—what we need—is to win. The current surveys show us what direction this is heading, and even the closest candidate to Marcos is Isko, a Marcos wannabe himself. The Liberal campaign, as far as this outsider can tell, has nothing but a change in color that fools no one. (And while I’m here, let me say that after I removed myself from the Leni campaign groups, my newsfeed on FB has ceased to be pink. I took only about 10 days for that algorithm to change, and it’s an important thing to consider whenever you think, or imagine, that the numbers on our side are growing, or that there is “public clamor” for anything at all. Know that algorithms make us think that, for a reason.)

And this is also why Grace remains, to me, the most viable candidate that can win 2022 for us versus Marcos-Duterte-Go.

Despite no massive campaign effort, no propaganda machinery, Grace has consistently been in surveys. She is on no one’s algorithm on social media, and has pretty much stuck to soundbites and statements related to her work in the Senate. And yet she is in the minds of people who are surveyed, people who we insist we “need to reach” beyond our echo chambers on social media, this same people already being reached by the cash and machinery of the most corrupt politicians unlike any we’ve seen before.

Grace is already there. She is right there with the rest of them, with the Marcoses and Dutertes and Gos and Pacquiaos and Morenos. And she is there without the benefit of a campaign. She doesn’t only have a foot in that door. She is already a presence in the room.

Imagine what Grace’s numbers would be if there was an effort to get her the presidency? Imagine what it would be like if her party, the Nationalist People’s Coalition, the one that she has been part of since the start, actually played this game right, and convinced her to run in place of Lacson? Imagine the power of that Poe-Sotto tandem, with its mass appeal, its years of public service, its Eat Bulaga and Ang Probinsyano mileage, its appeal to the Catholic Church, the support it can get from big business, and its palatability even to the most critical of us in the middle classes.

The Liberal Pinks will say: that is choosing the lesser of evils. And my response to that is this: beyond your echo chambers, the Liberal Party, is just as evil for many. And to voters who suffered through LP’s elitist politics, and who are watching as the elitism continues in this campaign, even VP Leni is a lesser evil.

The Liberal Pinks will say: how can you want who is winnable versus who is “right”? And my answer to that is simple: in an election like this one, where the campaign was happening long before we even started thinking about the elections, and propaganda was created and money flowed long before we even began strategizing any of our 2022 campaigns, the right candidate is the one who stands with us on issues and has the biggest chance of winning. To remove winnability from the equation is a gross mis-assessment of this electoral landscape, now made even more vile and corrupt by the Marcoses and Dutertes, and now even more skewed against us. 

Grace balances that out for us. She has a winnability that would put even Moreno and Pacquiao to shame. Her name recall is solid, as proven by the surveys. She is open to speaking to people across the political spectrum, including the Left. She already holds the imagination of the mass vote, and we all know by now that enough of the middle class can decide in her favor, and certainly she will have big business support given NPC roots.

Liberal Pinks will ask: what has she done throughout the pandemic? And will also assert she is trapo. I will argue that (1) what she has done is what all Senators were limited to doing; and (2) the traditional politician criticism holds no water when we are faced with a long list of non-traditional politicians who are in the Duterte government, including shameless idiots like Bato and Go, Tulfo and Lapid, Revilla and Pacquiao. Whoever you think is still being swayed by the anti-trapo rhetoric is living in 2004, if not 1998.

And no, this is not to kill the idealism of the new voters, or to question the commitment to a VP Leni campaign—you guys do you. But you doing that, and your echo chamber doing that, does not make that right for everyone, or for nation. It is clear now after all, that our sense of what nation needs, what it demands of us, what it requires, is very different among us on this side of the #EndDuterte #BlockMarcos fence—and this is precisely our problem.

I also hear all of those who say that what we need is systemic change. But it has to be reiterated that elections do not change systems—it’s the sustained actions of citizens that do, beyond the elections. I also think that given how everything looks like it’s going against us, that if the goal is to beat Marcos-Duterte, then we should be focusing not on changing systems, but on winning 2022. I see these elections as critical not just because we need to beat Marcos-Duterte-Go; at this point, I would just be happy with going back to a status quo where killings are not normal and rights are respected again. Those are two different battles, that demand different players, and different weapons.

Half of all our problems would be solved if we had a winnable candidate that we can actually work with, a candidate that has a good showing in surveys to begin with, and is already a player in this battle. The fact is we have no capacity to change this battle at this point, and certainly we have no way of winning if we don’t play this game. There’s just too little time, too little resources, and too much disunity, going against us. The candidate we need has to play this electoral game, while standing strong on the the unities we forge based on the crucial issues that matter. She needs to be credible and winnable, goes beyond the class and political divides, and is unbothered by the propaganda machinery of the Duterte-Marcoses the past six years.

Right now, with a day to go to substitutions, there is nothing to lose in throwing this out into the wild of the internet: this candidate is Grace Poe. ***