In contrast to the polling data cited by Steenhuisen, she suggested that if elections were held tomorrow, the DA may well only get 16% share of the vote, even if the ANC's numbers also plummeted. She regaled the congress with anecdotes of people she had met everywhere who wondered whether the DA could be trusted. She spent some time, by way of example, detailing the very serious trust deficit that the DA faces.
Phalatse's speech was, argues McKaiser, perhaps more substantive in its self-examination of what the party had done wrong. It was positive, forward-looking, solutions-focused, and aiming at party cohesion rather than divisive critique in the public sphere. What was most striking for McKaiser, however, was the overall tone and energy of the speech. To that end, based on research showing what matters to voters currently, he listed many thematic areas that he would focus on as leader if he was re-elected, including energy insecurity, crime, unemployment, cadre deployment, improving the quality of our bureaucracy, and devolving more power to provincial and local governments.
He showed awareness of and implicitly conceded that the DA needs to communicate more effectively with voters.
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