Since a few months back, I have been quietly revealing to some friends that I actually anticipated a 70% popular vote share for the ruling party. And obviously, I got some weird stares back. People thought that I was either a die-hard support of PAP or I was just some hopeless optimist. But no, I was just a realist.

This is SG 50, Lee Kuan Yew had just passed away half a year earlier and the PAP had shown that they had are more left-of-centre now, with policies and schemes like the Pioneer Generation Package, SkillsFuture and of course, MediShield LIFE introduced in the past 4 years. In my humble opinion, I thought that the ruling party deserves an improved mandate and if they don’t get it during this round of election, they would never get it anytime soon in the next 50 years.

But obviously, I was not so confident ...