BIGGEST GRAND RALLY — Lakas-CMD Vice vice presidential candidate, Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte delivers her message of unity and thanks more than 300,000 supporters during the UniTeam Festival grand rally Monday night at City de Mare, Filinvest Grounds,SRP, Cebu City. Cebu officials led by Gov. Gwen Garcia and Mayor Michael Rama reassured Uniteam of a landslide victory. Photo by VER NOVENO
Cebu to give BBM-Sara record-high victory margin of more than 1M votes
CEBU CITY — Governor Gwen Garcia said Monday night that the province will set a new record high potential margins of victory of over one million votes in the coming polls for Partido Federal ng Pilipinas (PFP) standard-bearer Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. and Lakas-Christian Muslim Democrats (CMD) vice presidential candidate Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte.
“You do the math by comparison, I think we will be greater than what can be the previous margins of votes, lamang, and it also helps BBM and Inday Sara are way ahead over their next closest rival…and so certainly we would also have to give that tribute back to the UniTeam,” Garcia said when asked if the UniTeam tandem potential margins of victory in Cebu in the May 9 polls would exceed a million.
Marcos and Duterte have been consistent survey frontrunners.
Garcia, leader of the One Cebu local party, made this remark during a chance interview with reporters following the UniTeam mega festival rally at the City di Mare, Filinvest Grounds along SRP Coastal Road.
The mammoth rally was organized for UniTeam by the One Cebu local party led by Garcia, Lakas-CMD led by its President and House Majority Leader Martin G. Romualdez, and Tingog party-list headed by Rep. Yedda Marie K. Romualdez.
The rally was branded by Marcos as the biggest rally ever assembled for UniTeam in the current campaign.
“Alam ko po marami sa inyo ay kanina pa nag-antay, kanina pa nagbilad sa araw, pero hindi kayo umaalis kaya ngayon ang bilang ng rally ay ito na ang pinakamalaking rally sa buong kampanyang ito,” Marcos said in his speech.
This was saying something, given the impressive, six-digit strong rallies that Marcos had witnessed in past UniTeam rallies all over the country.
In her conservative estimate, Garcia said 300,000 people attended the rally here.
“Sabi ko I do not wish to give numbers, but if we do a little review and that happened in the past, in 2004 we delivered, imagine lamang, and we talked about votes, a margin of 1.2 million, margin of GMA (Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo) over FPJ (Fernando Poe Jr.),” Garcia said.
“If you recall she won the presidency in 2004, due to the margin of about 1.1 or 1.2 million and that is why she took her oath of office here,” she said of Arroyo.
It was more of the same during the 2016 presidential race, which was eventually won by then-Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte.
“In 2016 President Rodrigo Roa Duterte ran, One Cebu truly support the candidacy of PRRD and won with a margin of about of 1.2 [million], a margin again, lamang, over Mar Roxas,” she recalled.
Garcia said this came at a time when One Cebu wasn’t as united as it is now.
“Ngayon I’m governor, the mayor of Cebu City, the mayor of Lapu-Lapu City, the mayor of Mandaue city and I representing 44 towns and six component cities have now thrown our support behind the UniTeam so kaya for the first time, we have this One Cebu island phenomenon,”
Garcia said.
