Midterm Madness
And something about the Chair of Saint Peter
When it rains, it pours: a double-barreled dose of commentary on Monday’s midterms.
This week’s The Long View:
The Long View
The four horsemen of the apocalypse
By: Manuel L. Quezon III — @inquirerdotnet
Philippine Daily Inquirer / 04:30 AM May 14, 2025
Apocalyptic is how one academic has described the outcome of the 2025 midterm elections. This, the 13th midterm election, which is a referendum on the incumbent administration, certainly only has political misery for company. It marks only the fourth time in our electoral history that a president has been repudiated in the midterms.
What are the four horsemen of the 2025 apocalypse? Let us propose these four: first, unpopularity; second, incompletion; third, decay; and fourth, blindness. Because a midterm is always a referendum on the sitting president, the popularity-or lack of it-of the sitting president matters, and here, the President went into the fight by becoming increasingly unpopular. And because a midterm is about competing slates, it mattered that both main contenders, the President and the Vice President, went into the fight without complete slates. The President, at first, could proclaim he was the only one able to muster a complete slate, but his elder sister and the latest offering of the Villars proved fickle in their affections and fleeting in their loyalty. So he really only had 10. The Veep, for her part, had a slate not entirely her own since her father had his own candidates, and in the end even mashing them together meant only a partial slate was proclaimed: itself so stuffed with token candidates it took the defection of Marcos and Villar to strengthen their ranks.
Put another way, going into the fight, neither side could have achieved a sweeping victory in the first place. Here, decay enters into the picture: with the weakening of mass media, including the collapse of mainstream news outfits and the ghettoization of both TV and movies into an increasingly elite industry, making giant reputations or outsize media personalities is a thing of the past, when mass audiences still existed. By sheer longevity, those who gained stature in the old era are still able to seek election, but even they are increasingly remote figures to an increasingly young population. For some, their residual claims to fame are enough; for others, their time has clearly passed. What matters more are in a sense, committed fandoms, both the political kind or those that participate in elections as cohesive voting blocs.
Then there is blindness, which is the inability to see how the world around you is changing and adapt accordingly. It can either be thinking you can dance your way to victory or joke your way to a win without bothering with a platform, or becoming such a purist about ideology you alienate potential allies. It means forcing yourself as a candidate in an arena you aren’t competitive in, without accepting your limitations and looking for another arena where you can also join the fight.
The result can be described as apocalyptic but in a different sense. First, context: measuring this 13th midterm plebiscite by all the others, we have an unusual outcome: it was both a tie and a defeat. As of press time, the rankings showed five Alyansa vs. five DuterTen candidates in the winning circle. For a midterm, this is only the second tie ever; the first was Macapagal in 1963. But the surprise victory of KiBam (Kiko Pangilinan and Bam Aquino) also means the outcome is five admin, seven non-admin: a defeat, though a slim one (40 percent), nowhere on the same level as the truly catastrophic defeats of Quirino in 1951 (he lost, 0–9 or 100 percent), Arroyo in 2007, (2–10 or 16 percent) or Marcos in 1971 (2–6 or 25 percent).
This explains why, surprisingly, joining Marcos in seeming to lick their wounds instead of crowing, was Sara Duterte who expressed disappointment over the results-results hard-pressed to have been better, however much she had going for her slate, because of the weakness of her slate to begin with. The President may be limping, but he isn’t necessarily lame, and after having everything go for her, the Veep couldn’t definitively repudiate her tormentor. Instead, what we saw was a validation of Leni Robredo’s seemingly logic-defying campaign of 2022: in a world where Marcos and Duterte destroy each other, an alternative has a fighting chance.
The rules of the game mattered, too. Time and again, the surveys tell us that voters are hard-pressed to complete a list of more than eight senators. Because those defeated prior to martial law wanted a chance to win post-Edsa, our Senate elects 12 at a time instead of the eight we used to elect before martial law. This opened the door, in the ’90s, to dagdag-bawas; today, it leaves the door open to command votes, machine votes, or simply, suggestion votes (as in, “Can I suggest these names to fill up your 12 slots?”). This dynamic, many have sensed, led to the KiBam surprise. And at the end of the day, their core voters also held together in other races and other places, such as for the party list, where the established ones did badly.
Neither the President nor the Veep could hold the halves of their former coalition together. The next battleground, which made this midterm unique, is, of course, impeachment. The Palace is shaken, but not enough opposition could be stirred to result in the kind of repudiation that leads to an incumbent becoming a total lame duck. A moderately well-prosecuted trial can still be devastating.
My commentary in The Asia Sentinel:
The Philippines’ Midterm Massacre
Ferdinand Marcos’ unwanted showdown
May 13, 2025
By: Manuel L. Quezon III
On May 12, Filipinos conducted an exercise they’ve regularly done since 1938: they held a midterm referendum on the sitting president. The result, pass or fail, wouldn’t be decided in the House of Representatives or the many local positions from governor to councilor also up for grabs, but rather, in one arena only: the Philippine senate, where half of its membership was up for election, too.
The senatorial results traditionally serve as the bellwether of lame duck status. Prior to 2025, three presidents had suffered a midterm repudiation: it foreshadowed doom for two of them (Elpidio Quirino in 1951 who lost reelection in 1953, and Ferdinand E. Marcos in 1971, who then proclaimed martial law less than a year later), back in the days the presidents could still run for reelection. For Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who suffered the second-biggest midterm defeat in 2007, it augured trouble to come and the impossibility of engineering a favorable succession.
Turnout was exceedingly high for a midterm, approximating that of a presidential election. The polls closed at around 7 pm and from 10 pm to midnight, the writing was on the wall and it was a shocker. In the first place, the four reputable survey firms had essentially failed to accurately predict the results. No one had expected the administration to do well, but it did worse than expected. The verdict was five senators from Marcos’ coalition, five for the Duterte coalition. The biggest surprise of all, was that two from the ranks of the centrist coalition that both Marcos and Duterte had crushed in 2016 and 2022 — Bam Aquino (of the famous clan loyalists of both the President and Vice President had waged vendetta against) and Francis Pangilinan, defeated vice-presidential candidate in 2022 — would be returning to the Senate.
For the public keeping score, the verdict was clear: Marcos 5, everybody else, 7. A defeat.
But the main battlelines betray an important detail: it was also a tie. The main camps, after all, ended up in a draw, with five senators each. This, despite the clearly existential stakes for both the President and the Vice-President. It’s no surprise then, that Marcos’s philosophical election statement was exceeded in its lack of enthusiasm, by the Vice-President’s, who more frankly expressed disappointment.
The political reality is that the battle was joined between two sides with nearly unprecedented advantages that both squandered.
Marcos had the advantage of incumbency, and of momentum, with his first cousin, the Speaker of the House, having impeached the Vice-President and his Secretaries of Justice and the Interior managing the apprehension and handover of former president Duterte to the custody of the International Criminal Court where he is standing trial.
Marcos had no shortage of resources; he alone had been able to cobble together a full 12-candidate slate, and it was a highly conventional one: that is, a combination of increasingly long in the tooth but electable veterans, relative newcomers considered personally valuable to the presidency, or legacy candidates preparing to take their turn at the trough.
What Marcos lacked was popularity. The first post-1986 president to achieve an electoral majority, by the time the midterms approached, public opinion had soured, with nearly three of four voters unhappy with his administration. While big business was happy with him, the public wasn’t, when it came to inflation. While Rodrigo Duterte himself had started the rift that eventually erupted in open hostilities, his daughter was able to frame it as a case of a hapless Marcos unable to rein in the appetites of his wife and his first cousin, the speaker. And what Marcos failed to keep together -his winning coalition-he further proved incapable of maintaining cohesion on his side of the fence. By election day, two of the President’s candidates, including his elder sister, Senator Imee Marcos, and Camille Villar, the daughter of a former Speaker of the House (and one of the country’s richest plutocrats) had left his camp, seeking the endorsement of the Vice-President Sara Duterte and her father.
The 10-candidate rump of the President’s slate proceeded to mount an unimaginative campaign, with its leading vote-getters gradually sinking. Half proved viable, in the end, not least because of the corresponding weakness of the Duterte slate.
Duterte slates, to be precise, because until the very end, there were two power centers in the Duterte Universe: the former President himself and, in his absence, his common-law wife, Honeylet Avanceña, and the Vice-President herself. They didn’t necessarily see eye to eye on who deserved to be considered part of the Elect. The most bankable of the Duterte acolytes, his political Man Friday, Bong Go, for example, was always considered close to Honeylet but despised by Sara; and when Imee Marcos, seeing her poll numbers plummeting, gambled on disowning her brother, Sara anointed her while Honeylet refused to do so. The Dutertes, in the end, could only mount a slate of 10, with only incumbent Senators Go and Dela Rosa, old-time henchmen of the former president both, as their star attractions; the rest were either obscure and unelectable, or disgraced and the same, like Pastor Apollo Quiboloy campaigning from jail. Neither slate had a chance to sweep the field.
The lackluster nature of both slates goes a long way to explain the electoral surprise that ensued. Here, a few pieces of conventional wisdom are relevant. The first is that Filipinos hardly ever vote straight tickets; they mix and match senatorial candidates. The second is that time and again the tendency of the average voter is to have eight top-of-mind candidates and either leave the remaining four slots unfilled, or liable to being filled out on the basis of a whim, or an appeal, or more mercenary reasons. The third is that while national parties are essentially decorative, local political machines have remained durable and have an estimated effect on the outcome amounting to as high as 5 percent of the votes cast.
With the two main slates either lackluster or saddled by a combination of inept coalition-building or being tied to an unpopular incumbent, and both slates, furthermore, being incomplete, even the loyal from either side had no incentive to vote for 12 senators. The average voter mixing and matching would have had a limited pool from which to choose. Even command votes would have been hard-pressed to vote for 12.
In the midterm of 2019, the 12 thplaced senator received 30 percent of the vote; in 2025, it seems 23 percent was enough to secure last place. One of the surprise winners, Bam Aquino, with the vote he obtained in 2025, would only have earned the 7 thslot in 2019 though he came in second this time around. And yet, with voter turnout at 81 percent — presidential election levels-it suggests many voters didn’t bother to vote for 12, which in turn explains the surprising results for Aquino and Pangilinan, neither of whom were predicted to make it by the reputable surveys.
With both Marcos and Duterte slates at 10 slots each, and with Marcos wanting to keep two turncoats -the President’s sister and the former Speaker’s daughter-out, it wouldn’t be unimaginable for the two oppositionists to be preferrable to both sides as at least opposed to their main opponent, too. Put another way, both having waged campaigns “above the fray” in not actively antagonizing either Marcos or Duterte, focusing on their own initiatives of education and food, respectively, they could easily become the lesser evils for both machine politicians and the general public. This goes a long way to explain the unique set of circumstances that pole vaulted them into the winning circle.
Hence, the contest being a tie that resulted in a defeat: a validation of the thinking that led then-Vice-President Leni Robredo to challenge Ferdinand Marcos Jr. for the presidency in 2022 and the union of Marcos and Duterte, temporarily though it was, to present an unbeatable combination. If the Marcoses and Dutertes hadn’t combined, they might have canceled each other out, and Robredo could have won the presidency. As it stands, Marcos and Duterte canceled each other out, giving a second wind to cohesive, but downcast, coalition that didn’t expect to win, but did (it’s a sign of true weakness, though, is that it had the smallest senate slate of all).
What made this year’s midterm such good copy is that it is a proxy fight as much as it is a plebiscite. Since Vice President Duterte’s been impeached, the first order of business of the new senate, with half its membership decided in this election, will be her trial. Sixteen votes are needed to convict; with the results as they stand, acquittal has six firm votes. The remaining 18 senators are nominally uncommitted though most observers believe it will be an uphill climb for conviction. The House, however, remains firmly in the administration’s hands, most, though not all, of the congressmen and women who’d impeached Duterte have survived the midterms. Public opinion, in the end, based on the conduct of the trial, will have an outsized effect on the outcome.
Manuel L. Quezon III is a Filipino writer, former television host, and a grandson of former Philippine president Manuel L. Quezon
Some references
The Comelec dashboard. See also Philippine election information hub for some interesting stats. 2025 Philippine Senate election has the rosters of the competing slates:
The Inquirer election results dashboard for national and local is pretty nifty.
The surprisingly defeated aside from the unsurprisingly victorious:
Celebrities:
*Luis Manzano
*Marco Gumabao
*Mocha Uson
*Bong Revilla (14th so far)
*Jimmy Bondoc
*Phillip Salvador
*Willy Revillame
Old Pols:
- Cynthia Villar
- Joey Salceda
- Gwen Garcia
In sum
Crucial factors in a midterm election-
- Popularity of the President: Some argue sinking ratings put the President at par with Arroyo in 2007
- Geography: ethnic and regional voting blocs. Where the votes are: the Lingayen-Lucena Corridor has 40% of the national votes + The top 10 provinces outside NCR matter, including their potential ethnic/regional loyalties
- Machinery: “Delivering” the national vote, estimated at plus or minus 5%
Where the battle is fought:
- Television and the Internet are on top
- Personal Circles come next
- Radio matters locally too
The public was motivated in this election -
- The turnout was historically high, greater than the 2019 midterms and most likely, the highest midterm turnout since 1987
- The results suggest cohesion and solidarity on the part of the main groups: the Marcos Loyalists, the Duterte Diehards, and the Pink Coalition since 2022 that replaced the 1986–2016 Yellow Forces.
- Demographic trends (increasing migration inside the country, the weakening of old networks and ties for entrenched political clans, the weakening of the reach and power of mass media and traditional institutions) means an increasing percentage of the mercenary electorate.
The surveys didn’t converge; instead wide divergence in results. Factors affecting the outcome:
- Very high turnout. Many rural precincts surpassed 85% turnout.
- @CleveArguelles of @WR_Numero: 60% of voters millenials and Gen Zs. Youth vote preferences may have been underreported.
- Ronald Homes of Pulse Asia predicted possibility that the last six might change come election day.
- Historically, voters fill up only 8 out 12 of their senatorial slots.
- Neither Marcos nor Duterte slates were complete or remained whole.
- Command votes mattered more than usual.
Voting behavior concerning the Senate:
- Repeatedly, surveys reveal most voters can’t/don’t/won’t complete a full list; most pick 8 choices
- Ticket voting is rare; most view their votes as something to distribute in a spread
- Endorsements also include individuals from different slates
The result of weak slates, cohesive blocs(including command votes) open to “adopting” other candidates, was greater uncertaintly-
- INC made support for Marcoleta a condition for carrying local candidates
- Machine/command votes could more easily “suggest” candidates to complete the “Magic 12” since neither side had more than 10 anyway
- Anti-administration sentiment, celebrity fatigue from younger voters, KiBam campaigning “above the fray” (not focusing on either side) effects
The Verdict?Both a draw and a defeat.
- A draw: 5 Bagong Pilipinas and 5 DuterTen meant despite an unpopular president, a disunited slate that ran a subpar campaign with no central message, and despite a base upset over the impeachment and the ICC arrest, neither side could muster either a complete victory or defeat.
- A defeat: Still, the victory of KiBam means that the public will consider the eventual outcome as 5 for the admin, 7 for the different kinds of opposition, so a defeat for the admin.
“Biggest winners: Sarah Duterte, the Leni Robredo movement, AKBAYAN, the Iglesia Ni Cristo, the perpetually online. Biggest losers: BBM, survey firms, the Makabayan Left.” — @holistic
And yet, while President was philosophical in defeat, why was the Veep also unhappy? What makes this midterm unique is outcome affects possible votes in Veep’s impeachment. Moving forward-
- But among admin defeats, its far from the overwhelming results of 1951, 2007, or 1971 the three biggest repudiations.
- President will retain control of Senate, House, and LGUs but suffers reputational damage.
- Impeachment will still depend on how senators perceive public opinion, which in turn affects the chances of prosecution (admin) and defense (Veep).
- Neither side can afford to ignore the Middle Forces while the Radical Left is weakened.
- The actual draw between presidency and veep means both sides will view the coming confrontations as even more winner-takes-all.
Petrine Matters
Just a sampler of analysis on the new papacy. Starting with my favorite Vatican watcher: Leo XIV, the Pope, called to bring unity. An American Vatican watcher, John Thavis, blogs, The traditionalist view bears watching: Robert Francis Prevost is Pope LEO XIV. A First Analysis.
Originally published at https://mlq3.substack.com.
