If Nigerians vote as they did in 2023 but more of them turn up, the race for Aso Rock looks very different Turnout in the South-East, Kano’s Kwankwaso machine, four state reversals and a regional upstart may matter more than any change of heart.
Nigerians will choose a president in fewer than 100 days, most of them preoccupied with insecurity and the soaring cost of living Yet the election holds a paradox. The electorate is bigger than ever and the field more fragmented, but the outcome may turn less on what voters think than on which of them actually vote.
Start with the numbers The register has swollen to 103.4m, from 93.5m in 2023. State-by-state results from the last election, compiled by and , supply the map. Hold preferences constant – Tinubu voters stay with Tinubu, Atiku’s with Atiku, Obi’s with Obi and Kwankwaso’s with Kwankwaso – and change only turnout. The map starts to misbehave.
A caveat: this is a scenario, not a forecast or a poll It combines the 2026-27 register with 2023 state-level vote shares, then layers on assumptions – constructed turnout rates, an Obi–Kwankwaso merger, swapped vote shares in Plateau, Osun, Taraba and Bayelsa, and a hypothetical Makinde–Bala ticket on the APM platform in Bauchi and Oyo. Later sections test direct switches between Mr Tinubu and Mr Atiku. Nor does the model adjust for rigging. It does not need to: the 2023 results were challenged all the way to the Supreme Court on grounds of irregularities and upheld. Whatever irregularities occurred are therefore already built into the legally settled baseline on which these projections rest.
In 2023 Mr Peter Obi ran up huge margins in parts of the South, but many of his strongholds turned out only modestly Mr Bola Tinubu and Mr Abubakar Atiku, by contrast, drew heavily on high-turnout states. Apply the 2023 national turnout of 26.71% uniformly to the new register and the arithmetic gives Mr Tinubu 9.60m votes, an Obi–Kwankwaso ticket 8.97m and Mr Atiku 7.23m. The merger alone transforms the race. The more interesting question is what happens if low-turnout areas start behaving like high-turnout ones.
Take Anambra and Kano Suppose Anambra’s voters, instead of repeating their lacklustre 2023 showing, turned out at roughly Kano’s rate. Extend that across Mr Obi’s 2023 winning states: a turnout floor of 31.7%, with higher historical rates kept wherever they already exceeded it. The result flips. Obi–Kwankwaso edges ahead with 10.14m votes to Mr Tinubu’s 10.06m, with Mr Atiku on 7.51m – a margin of barely 85,000. That should unsettle every party headquarters. Mr Obi may not need to win in 2027 over millions of 2023 Tinubu voters; he may first need to get more of his own sympathisers to the polls.
Two can play that game Give Mr Atiku’s states the same treatment, however, and the advantage evaporates. Higher turnout in Adamawa, Bauchi, Gombe, Kaduna, Katsina, Kebbi, Osun, Sokoto, Taraba, Yobe and the rest of his territory does not help him alone, because his rivals also polled heavily there. Mr Tinubu returns to the lead with about 11.05m votes, against 10.50m for Obi–Kwankwaso and 8.83m for Mr Atiku. Do the same for Mr Tinubu’s states and turnout climbs towards 34.7m, roughly 33.6% of the register: Mr Tinubu 12.16m, Obi–Kwankwaso 10.79m, Mr Atiku 9.51m. The incumbent’s structural advantage reasserts itself.
The lesson: mobilisation cannot be judged in isolation If everyone gets out the vote equally well, the advantage returns to the coalition with the best mix of geographical spread, big-state strength and respectable second places.
Elections are not reruns, so introduce some movement Suppose Plateau, which Mr Obi won in 2023, swings to Mr Tinubu; rather than invent a swing, simply swap the two men’s 2023 vote shares. Do the same for three of Mr Atiku’s states – Osun, Taraba and Bayelsa – drifting towards Mr Tinubu. Mr Tinubu rises to about 12.48m; Obi–Kwankwaso slips to 10.62m and Mr Atiku to 9.35m. His lead stretches to some 1.86m. Four states have changed the complexion of the race.
Enter the spoiler Now add a Makinde–Bala ticket on the APM platform that concentrates on just two states: Bauchi, Mr Atiku’s in 2023, and Oyo, Mr Tinubu’s. In each, the previous winner is demoted to runner-up and the newcomer takes the winning share. That gives the APM about 584,000 votes in Bauchi and 601,000 in Oyo – some 1.18m from two states alone.
A four-way race Under the full scenario, turnout reaches about 35m. Mr Tinubu wins 11.69m votes (33.67%), Obi–Kwankwaso 10.62m (30.58%), Mr Atiku 8.96m (25.79%) and Makinde–Bala 1.18m (3.41%); other candidates share the remaining 2.2m (6.55%). Mr Tinubu still leads, but by only a little more than one million.
Note what did not happen Nobody conjured an electoral revolution. The exercise merely enlarged the electorate, nudged turnout, merged two camps, moved four states and added a regional challenger. Yet the lead changed hands, and the winning margin ranged from 85,000 to 1.86m. Much hinges on turnout, nowhere more than in the South-East, whose five states hold about 11.98m registered voters. But registration confers no clout by itself: a voter who stays at home counts for exactly as much as one who never registered. Turnout may be the great hidden variable of 2027.
Lagos has nearly 75m registered voters. At 31.7% turnout that means almost 2.4m ballots. On 2023 shares, Obi–Kwankwaso takes about 1.05m to Mr Tinubu’s 1.02m – a statistical dead heat. A shift of a few tens of thousands could tip the national result. Lagos is worth not merely winning, but winning well.
The art of losing well Perhaps the least intuitive lesson is that the presidential race is not 37 winner-takes-all contests. A candidate who loses a state 45 to 40 still banks his 40. Winning more states is a different strategy from maximising the national vote while keeping enough geographical spread.
Kingmakers, not kings With 1.18m votes, Makinde–Bala is nowhere near first place. Yet its effect could be outsized, because it does not draw votes evenly: in Bauchi it hurts mainly Mr Atiku, in Oyo mainly Mr Tinubu. A small fourth candidate concentrated in the right states can wield influence out of all proportion to its national share. Whoever comes fourth could help decide who comes first.
The model boils the election down to four linked contests The first is over turnout: can low-participation strongholds vote in greater numbers without their rivals doing the same? The second is over coalitions: Obi–Kwankwaso looks formidable because it pairs strength in the South-East, the Middle Belt and Lagos with Mr Kwankwaso’s following in Kano. The third concerns defecting states: Plateau, Osun, Taraba and Bayelsa show how a handful of plausible shifts can move hundreds of thousands of net votes. The fourth is the spoiler contest, in which a Makinde–Bala-style ticket matters without ever being nationally competitive.
A frightening number Mr Tinubu’s final lead of a little more than one million is roughly 1% of a register of more than 103m. With only about a third of registered voters turning out, modest changes among today’s non-voters could easily swamp it.
Atiku’s turnout route
Can Mr Atiku simply out-mobilise everyone? Only just, and only on generous terms If he keeps Bayelsa, Osun and Taraba – reversing the swaps above – he needs turnout of about 94% across the 12 states he carried in 2023. He overtakes Obi–Kwankwaso at roughly 54.5%, but Mr Tinubu is the binding constraint. At 94% it is a photo finish: Mr Atiku and Mr Tinubu both on about 17.0m, separated by just 1,656 votes, with Obi–Kwankwaso on 13.32m and Makinde–Bala on 1.97m. National turnout would leap to about 52.6m, just over half the register.
Keep the swaps and turnout alone cannot do it The break-even rate against Mr Tinubu rises to about 121% – a mathematical impossibility. Even at 100% turnout in all 12 states, Mr Tinubu polls 18.02m to Mr Atiku’s 17.37m, a lead of some 656,000.Why is the bar so high? First, extra turnout is shared: with 2023 shares fixed, Mr Tinubu and Obi–Kwankwaso also gain, notably in Katsina, Kebbi, Sokoto, Osun and Bauchi, where Mr Tinubu was a competitive runner-up. Second, with the APM taking the winning share in Bauchi, a higher turnout there helps Makinde–Bala more than it does Mr Atiku. Third, in Bayelsa, Osun and Taraba, Mr Tinubu now holds the larger share, so every extra voter there widens his lead.
If Mr Atiku cannot win through turnout, he must win through persuasion Start from the final four-ticket projection: Mr Tinubu 11.69m, Obi–Kwankwaso 10.62m, Mr Atiku 8.96m, Makinde–Bala 1.18m. Each northern Tinubu voter who switches to Mr Atiku closes the gap between them by two votes. Mr Atiku overtakes Mr Tinubu after about 1.37m switches, but that is not enough, because Obi–Kwankwaso does not move. To finish first, he needs about 1.66m – roughly 30% of Mr Tinubu’s 2023 northern vote of about 5.6m.
At 1m switches, Mr Tinubu and Obi–Kwankwaso are separated by about 75,000 votes, with Mr Atiku still third Only at around 2m does he move clear, leading Obi–Kwankwaso by about 339,000 and Mr Tinubu by about 1.26m. The crucial word is net. Every southern Atiku voter who drifts to Mr Tinubu adds one to the northern requirement: lose 500,000 in the South, and he needs about 2.16m converts (38.6% of Mr Tinubu’s 2023 northern vote); lose 1m, and he needs 2.66m (47.5%). Even with no southern losses, a comfortable 500,000-vote victory would take about 2.16m switches.
The North is not one bloc
It is tempting to split Nigeria into a northern Atiku constituency and a southern Tinubu one The arithmetic is messier. In 2023 Mr Tinubu led Mr Atiku across the 19 northern states and the FCT by only about 365,000 votes, against roughly 1.46m in the South. Split the North further, and the picture sharpens. Across the North-West and North-East – the Core North – Mr Atiku actually won, by about 234,000. That conceals two contests: Mr Tinubu took the North-West by some 323,000, Mr Atiku the North-East by about 556,000.
In other words, “Atiku takes the North, Tinubu takes the South” largely happened in 2023 Mr Atiku’s problem was scale: Mr Tinubu’s southern margin was more than six times his Core North advantage.
Between the two blocs sits the North-Central, which should not be treated as an appendage of the Core North In 2023 it split three ways: Mr Tinubu won about 1.76m votes, Mr Obi and Mr Kwankwaso together about 1.48m and Mr Atiku about 1.16m. Mr Tinubu carried Benue, Kogi, Kwara and Niger; Mr Obi took Nasarawa, Plateau and the FCT. With APC-leaning territory, old PDP constituencies, strong Obi support and ethnically and religiously mixed electorates, it is a genuine swing belt. A 10% transfer of Mr Tinubu’s North-Central vote to Mr Atiku would move about 176,000 votes and swing their head-to-head margin by about 352,000 – meaningful, but not decisive alone. Its leverage lies in amplifying a Core North recovery or protecting a southern lead.
The real swap: Core North for the South
Now strip out the turnout boosts, swaps and spoiler and return to the plain baseline: 2671% turnout applied to each state’s share of the 103.4m register, with 2023 vote shares held state by state. About 27.6m votes are cast across three theatres. The 2023 pattern survives, but its scale changes. Mr Atiku’s Core North lead shrinks to about 132,000, while Mr Tinubu’s southern lead swells to almost 1.9m – more than fourteen times as large. And the North-Central is far from neutral: it hands Mr Tinubu a further 610,000. Before a single southern vote is counted, he is about 479,000 ahead across the North and the FCT.
Now test a reciprocal realignment: a share of Mr Tinubu’s Core North voters switches to Mr Atiku, while the same share of Mr Atiku’s southern voters switches to Mr Tinubu, with the North-Central unchanged Equal percentages are not equal numbers. Mr Tinubu’s Core North pool (3.88m) is nearly twice Mr Atiku’s southern one (2.10m), so at 10% about 388,000 northern voters move to Mr Atiku and only about 210,000 southern voters to Mr Tinubu.
The paradox is that both men grow stronger, in different halves of the country At 15%, Mr Atiku leads the Core North by almost 1.3m, yet Mr Tinubu leads the South by about 2.52m and the country by about 1.84m. Drawing from the larger pool, Mr Atiku closes the gap, but slowly: across the two blocs, break-even comes at about 49.4% – nearly half of Mr Tinubu’s Core North support defecting while the same share of Mr Atiku’s southern vote goes the other way. That is not a swing but a realignment, and it would still leave Mr Tinubu’s 610,000 North-Central cushion intact. A northern recovery is therefore necessary for Mr Atiku but not sufficient: he must also stop the PDP’s residual southern vote in Rivers, Oyo, Ogun, Akwa Ibom and beyond from shrinking.
That makes the North-West arguably the decisive battlefield Mr Atiku already beat Mr Tinubu in the North-East; the bigger, harder prize lies in Kano, Kaduna, Katsina, Jigawa, Kebbi, Sokoto and Zamfara. A net 1m switches there would turn his projected Core North edge of about 132,000 into some 2.13m. Yet Mr Kwankwaso’s Kano machine, now on the Obi ticket, competes for the same voters, so Mr Atiku must both peel away Mr Tinubu’s coalition and stop Mr Kwankwaso keeping his own. Mr Tinubu’s task is simpler: stay competitive in the Core North while widening his southern lead. The geometry is intricate. Mr Atiku wants Mr Tinubu’s northern voters; Mr Tinubu wants Mr Atiku’s southern ones; Mr Obi wants higher turnout in the South-East, Lagos and the Middle Belt; and Makinde–Bala bleeds both front-runners in Oyo and Bauchi.
Nor is a plurality sufficient: the winner must also meet the constitutional requirement of geographic spread of support Mr Atiku’s path, therefore, needs some mix of a larger Core North realignment, smaller southern losses, a decisive North-Central performance, gains among other candidates’ 2023 voters, and higher turnout among his own. The contest is neither a simple North–South confrontation nor a replay of 2023, but a three-part struggle: the Core North sets the size of Mr Atiku’s challenge, the South anchors Mr Tinubu’s advantage, and the North-Central – Plateau, Benue, Niger, Nasarawa, Kogi, Kwara and the FCT – is the hinge. Mr Atiku must not only win the Core North by enough to survive the South; he must stop Mr Tinubu using the North-Central to cancel that northern advantage before the southern votes are even counted.
Mr Obi’s path is the shortest of the challengers’ In the four-ticket projection, Obi–Kwankwaso trails Mr Tinubu by more than one million votes, and unlike Mr Atiku, it has only one rival to pass. It also has three ways to do so.
The first is turnout The Kano test showed that lifting his 2023 states to a modest 31.7% floor was enough to put him narrowly ahead. The South-East alone holds about 11.98m registered voters. If extra voters there split as lopsidedly as in 2023 – say, an 80-point net margin over Mr Tinubu, an illustrative figure – it would take about 1.34m additional ballots, or roughly 11 more points of turnout across the five states, to close the whole gap. Lagos, a statistical dead heat in the model, offers a cheaper top-up: there, a few tens of thousands of extra Obi votes count almost double.
The second is persuasion Because each direct Tinubu-to-Obi switch closes the gap by two votes, Obi–Kwankwaso needs only about 537,000 converts to edge ahead – about a third of the 1.66m Mr Atiku requires. The third route is the most intriguing, because Mr Obi need not do it himself. If Mr Atiku’s northern recovery takes more than one million votes from Mr Tinubu, but fewer than about 1.66m, Mr Tinubu falls below Obi–Kwankwaso while Mr Atiku is still short of it. Obi–Kwankwaso would then finish first without winning a single extra vote. Mr Atiku’s success in the North could make Mr Obi president.
The risks are equally clear The ticket depends on Mr Kwankwaso holding Kano against Mr Atiku’s northern push, on Plateau not drifting further, and on its supporters doing what they conspicuously failed to do in 2023: turning up.
Tinubu’s route: a quiet election
Mr Tinubu’s arithmetic runs the other way, and it is the most important lesson in the model His greatest asset is not enthusiasm among his own voters but quiet in the states he lost. Turnout does not affect him evenly. It depends on where people vote.
The pattern is stark A rise of about five points in turnout across Mr Obi’s 2023 states turns a Tinubu lead of 630,000 into an 85,000 deficit. Yet higher turnout in Mr Atiku’s states restores Mr Tinubu’s lead, because he was a strong runner-up across much of the North and banks his share of every extra ballot. Mr Tinubu’s ideal election is therefore lopsided: high turnout in his own heartlands and Mr Atiku’s, and low turnout in the states Mr Obi carried in 2023 – Lagos, the FCT, Nasarawa, Plateau, Edo, Delta, Cross River and the five states of the South-East. The voters who stayed at home in those states in 2023 were, arithmetically, among his most valuable allies.
There is a legitimate version of this strategy and an illegitimate one The legitimate version is a matter of campaign choices: avoid rhetoric that energises opponents in the South-East and Lagos, compete for respectable second places rather than provoke a backlash, and pour get-out-the-vote resources into the South-West and the North. The illegitimate version – intimidation, violence, late or missing election materials, obstruction at polling units, or interference in the distribution of voter cards – is voter suppression and a crime. The model cannot tell the two apart. It only shows how much is at stake. For a defending incumbent, a quiet election in hostile territory is worth more than an exciting one at home. That is why the single most revealing number on election night may not be any candidate’s vote total but turnout in the states Mr Tinubu lost in 2023. If it stays near 2023 levels, the incumbent is probably safe. If it rises by even a handful of points, the race is open. And if it falls, INEC, observers and the opposition should be asking why.
The voter who wasn’t there
Candidates are supposed to win by persuading voters to switch sides Nigeria’s arithmetic suggests something subtler. The decisive voter of 2027 may not be the Atiku supporter who defects to Mr Obi, the Obi supporter who drifts to Mr Tinubu or the Tinubu loyalist tempted by a fourth party. It may be the registered voter in Aba, Awka, Kano, Jos, Lagos, Ibadan, Bauchi or Kaduna who backed the same camp in 2023 – but did not vote.
If that Nigerian turns up while others’ supporters stay at home, nobody needs change their mind, and no stronghold needs change sides Yet the presidency might change hands. The race is less Tinubu v Atiku v Obi v the rest than a contest of registration, turnout, geography, coalition and fragmentation.
Hence the paradox Nigeria could go to the polls with more than 103m registered voters, cast fewer than 35m votes, split them among four serious blocs and settle the presidency by barely 1m. Its biggest political party may be the one that never appears on the ballot: the people who stay at home.