The TIFA survey released on May 14 has been read in two opposite ways this week, and both readings are technically correct. President William Ruto’s UDA party has collapsed from 38 per cent support in August 2022 to 17 per cent in May 2026 — a 21-point freefall in less than four years. And yet Ruto, personally, remains the single most preferred presidential candidate in the country at 24 per cent. Both numbers are in the same dataset. The space between them is where the 2027 election will be decided.
Start with what is genuinely bad for State House. UDA has lost more than half of its 2022 support. ODM, by way of comparison, has fallen from 32 to 18 per cent. The “broad-based government” experiment — Ruto’s post-protest fusion with Raila Odinga’s wing of ODM — has not delivered a unified base; it has cannibalised both parties. Voters who backed UDA in 2022 because it was not ODM, and voters who backed ODM in 2022 because it was not UDA, are now homeless and increasingly mobile. That homeless cohort, by TIFA’s own numbers, is now the largest single bloc in Kenyan politics.
Now look at where it has not gone. The three names competing to inherit it — former Interior CS Fred Matiang’i at 18 per cent, Wiper leader Kalonzo Musyoka at 18 per cent, and former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua at 17 per cent — are essentially tied within the margin of error. None of them clears 20 per cent. Each has a regional ceiling: Matiang’i in Gusii and the technocratic urban middle class, Kalonzo in Ukambani, Gachagua in Mt Kenya. None has yet shown the cross-regional pull that, on Kenyan electoral history, is the only path to State House on a first round.
This is what TIFA’s framing of a “weakening but possibly winning” Ruto actually describes. The president’s personal brand has lost altitude, but the opposition has not built the runway to land on it. The 24 per cent that still names him as preferred candidate is not enthusiasm; it is the residual gravity of incumbency, the visibility of office, and the absence — so far — of a single consolidated challenger. A fragmented opposition is mathematically Ruto’s best friend, even when he is unpopular.
The most consequential subplot in the poll is the rise of Gachagua’s Democracy for Citizens Party, which climbed from 6 per cent in November 2025 to 16 per cent in May 2026. That is the steepest party-level rise in the Kenyan polling cycle since Jubilee’s emergence in 2012. It is being read in Karen as a Mt Kenya rebellion against State House; it is being read in Mathira as proof that the impeachment of October 2024 was a political miscalculation. Both readings are partial. The truer story is that DCP has absorbed the protest vote of an entire region — Nyeri, Murang’a, Kirinyaga, Embu, parts of Meru — that feels it delivered Ruto the presidency and was rewarded with deputy-impeachment and finance-bill pain.
The poll’s unspoken variable is Gachagua’s eligibility itself. His impeachment is still being litigated at the High Court, and a ruling against him would render the 17 per cent he commands politically homeless again. That uncertainty is, paradoxically, holding the opposition together; nobody is willing to anoint a flag-bearer while the most popular Mt Kenya challenger is one judgment away from disqualification. Expect the court calendar, not the campaign trail, to set the tempo of opposition realignment for the rest of 2026.
For Kenya, three implications follow. First, the 2027 election is now structurally a two-round race in terms of voter intent, even if the constitution still treats it as a single ballot — a first-round split among three opposition candidates plus Ruto, with the second-round bargain happening before polling day in the form of a coalition. Whoever brokers that pre-election coalition will be Kenya’s next president; whoever sabotages it will deliver Ruto a second term by default. Second, the small-party arithmetic now matters more than at any point since 2007. Mwilu’s Pamoja, Eugene Wamalwa’s DAP-K, Jeremiah Kioni’s Jubilee remnant, and Martha Karua’s NARC-Kenya are each carrying 1–3 percentage points that, in a 2027 first round, could decide who reaches the runoff bargain. Third, the broad-based government is no longer a political strategy; it is now a political liability for both UDA and ODM simultaneously, and the leaders of both parties know it.
What to watch next is the High Court ruling on the Gachagua impeachment petition, expected before the end of June. Watch, too, for the first serious public flirtation between Matiang’i and Kalonzo — the only two-name combination in the TIFA dataset whose joint ceiling clears 30 per cent on day one. And watch Ruto’s own next move. A president sitting at 24 per cent and watching his party collapse does not stay still. He will either rebuild UDA, dissolve into a new vehicle, or — the option Nairobi is quietly betting on — invite Uhuru Kenyatta back into a grand coalition that swallows ODM whole. Whichever he chooses, the politics of 2026 will not look like the politics of January.
