Survey data says Nahdlatul Ulama is not the vote bank politicians think it is

Foreign write-ups of Indonesian elections usually treat Nahdlatul Ulama as a bloc of tens of millions of votes waiting to be won. Burhanuddin Muhtadi tested that idea against large-scale survey data and published the result in Fulcrum, the commentary site of the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. Mostly, it does not hold.

The first thing his surveys separate is feeling close to NU from actually belonging to it. In a national sample of 5,500 people, 54.6 percent of Muslim respondents said they feel close to NU. Only 16 percent said they are active members, and another 17 percent claimed membership without taking part in anything. In East and Central Java, NU's heartland, 78 percent identify with it and 55.5 percent keep NU religious practices regularly. The two provincial surveys behind those figures were unusually large, at 10,800 and 10,100 respondents.

That split matters at the ballot box, because the two groups vote differently. Active members leaned clearly towards Ganjar and Mahfud in the 2024 presidential race. Support for Prabowo and Gibran showed no measurable NU-membership effect at all, even though the PBNU chairman had backed them, which Muhtadi reads as Jokowi's personal pull rather than NU's machinery doing any work. Anies and Muhaimin also did worse among members than expected, despite Muhaimin leading PKB, the party that grew out of NU. Party choice showed the sharpest pattern of all: active members were far more likely to vote PKB and far less likely to vote PKS.

Muhtadi's conclusion is that NU delivers votes only where the branch structure is thick and the senior figures are saying the same thing. Where the tie is just cultural, the label buys nothing.

Why it matters

If you are an NU member, this is evidence that a deal signed at the top of your organisation does not carry your vote with it, and the 2024 numbers show members splitting away from the endorsed ticket. For everyone voting in 2029, treat an endorsement by any large organisation as a claim to check rather than a count of votes. The practical test is whether parties start spending on branch networks and consistent messaging, because that is the only thing Muhtadi found actually moving people.