The -11 Presidency: How a Survey Exposed the Rot Beneath the Malacañang Marble

Sara Has +31. Marcos Has -11. Do the Math.

By Louis ‘Barok’ C. Biraogo | October 9, 2026

THE number is -11. Not a temperature. Not a stock ticker. A political death rattle disguised as statistical noise.

When Social Weather Stations (SWS) released its third-quarter survey last week, the headline wrote itself: President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s net satisfaction rating had fallen from -7 to -11, crossing the threshold from “neutral” to “poor”. The Palace, as expected, shrugged. Surveys are snapshots, they said. Noise. Statistical hiccups.

But here is what the Palace does not want you to see: -11 is not a blip. It is a verdict. And the details buried beneath that single digit are far more damning than the headline.

**“Not Rejected. Abandoned. How -11 Became the Sound of a Presidency Shrinking Into Static.”**

The Arithmetic of Disillusionment

Let us begin with the arithmetic of disillusionment. Satisfaction fell from 38% to 35%. Dissatisfaction barely moved, inching from 45% to 46%. But the undecided? They ballooned from 17% to 20%.

Read that again. The President did not lose supporters to the opposition. He lost them to the void. Three percent of Filipino adults—roughly 2.3 million people—did not wake up one morning and decide to actively oppose Marcos. They simply stopped caring. Or worse: they stopped believing that caring would matter.

This is not a political crisis. This is political entropy. The slow, inexorable decay of a presidency that has not been rejected so much as abandoned.

The Geography of Abandonment

Consider the regional map, which reads less like a survey result and more like a divorce decree.

In Balance Luzon—the administration’s supposed stronghold—net satisfaction cratered from +11 to exactly 0. Not negative. Not positive. Zero. The statistical equivalent of a shrug. Millions of Filipinos, many of whom voted for Marcos in 2022, have apparently decided that the man who promised unity has delivered only indifference.
Metro Manila remains the deepest wound: -27, down three points from June. The capital region, where policy is made and where the President’s face adorns every other billboard, is now his most hostile constituency. The irony is almost literary.
The Visayas fell from -3 to -13, a ten-point collapse that suggests Cebu, Iloilo, and Bacolod have grown tired of waiting for the “development outside Metro Manila” that every SONA promises and no budget ever delivers.
And then there is Mindanao. The only region where Marcos improved—from -35 to -21, a 14-point gain. The Palace will spin this as vindication. But let us be precise: -21 is still “poor.” Mindanao did not embrace Marcos. It merely stopped hating him quite so intensely. This is not a political recovery. It is the baseline stabilization of a region that has been alienated since the day Rodrigo Duterte was shipped to The Hague.

The SONA That Nobody Believed

If the satisfaction numbers are bad, the SONA believability figures are apocalyptic.

Only 47% of Filipinos heard or read anything about the President’s fifth State of the Nation Address (SONA). Among those who did, 37% found it “more unbelievable than believable” or “entirely unbelievable,” compared to just 26% who leaned toward belief.

The net believability score: -11. Down eight points from September 2025.

Think about what this means. The President of the Philippines stands before Congress, delivers a nationally televised address, and the plurality of those paying attention conclude that he is not telling the truth.

Not that he is wrong. Not that his policies are misguided. That they do not believe him.

This is the crisis beneath the crisis. A President can survive unpopular policies. He cannot survive the collapse of his credibility. And the data suggests that collapse is already underway.

The Economy as Gaslight

The administration’s defense is predictable: the global economy. The Middle East war. The oil shock. The Strait of Hormuz.

There is truth here. The World Bank documented that Brent crude rose 42.5% between February and March 2026, that a 10% oil price increase could add 0.3–0.5 percentage points to headline inflation, and that a sustained 60% increase could slash nominal household incomes by 3.3%. The Philippines, importing 98% of its crude from the Middle East, was always going to bleed.

But here is the question the Palace never answers: What did you do about it?

The government declared a national energy emergency on March 24. It authorized temporary fuel excise reductions. It expanded demand management and supply augmentation measures. All of this is true.

And yet inflation hit 7.2% in September. Food inflation reached 6.7%. Transport inflation 14.6%. For the millions of Filipino families who do not have the luxury of parsing external shocks from domestic failures, the experience is simple: prices are rising, and the government is not helping.

The President’s SONA promised tax cuts, cheaper rice, and relief from electricity costs. The South China Morning Post noted that analysts immediately questioned how the government would fund these pledges, and why Marcos announced “no austerity or revenue-raising measures” to address the fiscal burden.

In other words: more promises, no plan. The same formula that has defined this presidency from day one.

The Duterte Shadow

We must address the elephant in the survey. Vice President Sara Duterte’s net satisfaction rating stands at +31—a 42-point gap with the President.

The Palace will tell you this is irrelevant. The Vice President is not the President. Her popularity does not transfer.

But that is precisely the point. In the Philippine political ecosystem, where alliances are transactional and loyalty is rented by the quarter, a Vice President with +31 is a gravity well. Every disaffected Marcos ally, every patronage network sensing the shifting winds, every local politician calculating their 2028 odds—they all see the same thing: the future, and it does not wear a Barong Tagalog.

Pulse Asia’s July survey showed Marcos’ trust rating at 28%, with 51% expressing distrust. Sara Duterte’s trust rating: 58%. In Mindanao, her approval reached 89%.

The President’s own cousin, Martin Romualdez, was arrested on plunder charges in September—during the survey period. The Ombudsman alleged P7.4 billion in bribes, monthly collections of P2 billion, and a scheme that funneled kickbacks through dummy companies and foreign exchange firms. Romualdez has denied wrongdoing. But the image is indelible: the President’s family, his own blood, implicated in the largest corruption scandal in recent Philippine history.

The Palace’s response? “We respect the filing of the case”. Spoken like a man who has run out of people to blame.

The Collateral Damage of Credibility

There is a passage in the SWS data that deserves particular attention. Among respondents who watched the SONA via social media and other websites, net satisfaction stood at -25.

The administration’s instinct will be to blame social media. Disinformation. Echo chambers. Algorithmic bias.

But consider the alternative explanation: people who seek out information are more likely to be dissatisfied because the information they find confirms what they already experience. They do not need Facebook to tell them that rice is expensive or that transport costs have consumed their disposable income. They need only look at their grocery receipts.

The President’s communication strategy appears to rest on the belief that enough messaging can overcome reality. This is a category error. You cannot PR your way out of an empty stomach.

The Legal Fiction of Legitimacy

Let us be clear about what -11 does not mean.

It does not mean the President will be removed from office. The Constitution’s impeachment grounds—culpable violation, treason, bribery, graft, high crimes, betrayal of public trust—require evidence, not opinion polls. A satisfaction rating is not a legal proceeding.

But it does mean something politically profound: the President has lost the benefit of the doubt.

Every future initiative will be met with skepticism. Every promise will be discounted. Every defense will be heard as excuse. The political capital that Marcos accumulated in 2022—that historic 31-million-vote mandate—has been spent, squandered, or simply evaporated.

The administration’s path forward is narrow. It requires simultaneous delivery on inflation, employment, infrastructure, and anti-corruption—all while managing a Vice President who is more popular than the President and a political opposition that is fragmented but energized. With two years remaining and 2028 succession politics already dominating the discourse, the window for a turnaround is closing.

The Question That Matters

The most revealing finding in the entire SWS release is not the -11. It is the finding that Marcos’ net satisfaction was -11 among both those who heard about the SONA and those who did not.

The speech did not matter. The message did not penetrate. The President spoke, and the country shrugged.

This is the terminal stage of a presidency: not active opposition, but indifference. The electorate has not rejected Marcos. They have simply stopped expecting anything from him.

And in a democracy, that is the most dangerous development of all.

Louis ‘Barok’ C. Biraogo is the author of the Kweba ni Barok blog. He writes on Philippine politics, governance, and the occasional absurdity of both.