“Yes, I was only second in your province for the vice president’s race in 2010. But in this coming elections, the Novo Ecijano voters will make me No. 1,” Roxas said in his campaign speech here Wednesday.
In the 2010 elections, former Makati City Mayor Jojemar Binay, then guest candidate for vice president under ex-President Joseph Estrada’s Puwersa ng Masang Pilipino (PMP), amassed 471,421 votes, while Roxas, who ran as vice president of eventual winner Noynoy Aquino, got 266,321 votes.
But while Roxas admitted that he lost in this province, he said “I was No. 2 and not in the tail-end of all the candidates for vice president then.”
Eight candidates ran for vice president in 2010.
He emphasized his reason why the Nueva Ecija voters will vote for him for president.
“The Nueva Ecija voters have experienced and gained much from the Daang Matuwid administration of President PNoy. I am sure that they, you, will give your mandate for me to continue that,” he emphatically told the more than 2,000 who gathered at the Pag-asa gym here.
The audience responded by giving the LP standard bearer an applause.
Before introducing Roxas for his campaign speech, President Aquino spoke about the gains of his administration, that included the 99.98 percent energization of the sitios in Central Luzon, the giving of shared facilities for many small and medium scale enterprises in the provinces, and farm to market roads, the Central Luzon Link Expressway from Tarlac to Cabanatuan City which construction will start next month, and the on-going construction of the Aurora-Nueva Vizcaya-Nueva Ecija highway.
Roxas’ claim for a victory in Nueva Ecija matters as the province is among the top-ten vote rich provinces in the country. The Commission on Elections (Comelec), in its list of registered voters for the 2016 elections, said Nueva Ecija has 1.29 registered voters making it the ninth voterich province in the country.
The other provinces in the Top 10 list are Cebu (2.41 million), Cavite (1.66 million), Pangasinan (1.62 million), Negros Occidental (1.55 million), Bulacan (1.48 million), Davao del Sur (1.47 million), Laguna (1.44 million), and Pampanga (1.2 million).
A local political observer, however, pointed out that in the last two presidential elections, the Nueva Ecija voters voted overwhelmingly for non-administration candidates. In the 2004 elections, Fernando Poe Jr. topped the race in the province while in 2010, it was ex-Pres. Joseph Estrada who got the most number of votes among the candidates for president.
Poe bested Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, 476,220 to 160,438, while Estrada got 426,542 over eventual winner President PNoy’s 295,015. The ruling party’s bet then was Gilbert Teodoro Jr.
