Sarawak State Election (PRN) — Complete Report & Projection

Compiled: 15 August 2026 · DUN seats: 82 (register: 82) · Last election: SE-12 (18 December 2021) · Result: GPS 76, PSB 4, PH 2 · Next dissolution: ~17 December 2026 · Status: PRN due in GE16 window · Model: uniform-swing v1.0

Archive: every prior report preserved in Report/states/DUN Sarawak/archive/

0. Executive Summary

This report presents a complete, self-contained analysis of the Sarawak state assembly (Dewan Undangan Negeri, DUN) as it stands entering the sixteenth general election cycle, built from the ground up: every seat count, every margin, every turnout figure, and every candidate-demographic statistic is computed live from the project's datasets at build time. Nothing is hand-typed. The report follows the same thesis discipline as the federal report — Sarawak is treated not as a collection of tables but as a political system with its own logic, its own balance of forces, and its own trajectory into GE16.

The central finding for Sarawak is GPS dominance at 76 of 82 seats (92.7 per cent of the assembly), a two-thirds-plus supermajority. Sarawak is the fixed point of the federal arithmetic — GPS 76 of 82, projecting to 78 — a two-thirds-plus fortress whose 31 federal seats make it the GE16 kingmaker. The margin structure tells the story: the average winning margin across the state's 82 seats is 39.9 percentage points, with 3 super-marginal seats under two points, 3 marginal seats between two and five, and 72 safe seats beyond ten — a distribution that defines how much of this state is genuinely contestable in GE16.

The state government, aligned with GPS, commands 76 seats against 6 for the opposition and independents combined — a cushion of +34 over the bare majority of 42. The most recent state election, SE-12 (18 December 2021), produced these headline movements in vote share: no fresh state-level swing data. The projection prepared for this report carries the base scenario to GPS 74 of 82 seats, with 2 seats flipping on the modelled swings.

Sarawak contributes 31 federal constituencies to the Dewan Rakyat, of which 2 are federal battlegrounds (GE15 margins under five points) — the seats where this state's dynamics feed directly into the national GE16 arithmetic. This report examines, in twelve sections, the state's electoral framework, its electorate, its PRN baseline, the demographics of its candidates, its federal delegation, the signals that have moved since the last state poll, the methodology behind the projection, the scenario range, the battlegrounds to watch, and the strategic implications for every bloc.

What to watch in Sarawak: Watch whether the PRN timing decision — concurrent with GE16 or separate — nationalises the state's campaign, and whether Abang Johari's succession question disturbs the machine.

1. Introduction & Context

Sarawak is the exception that tests every generalisation about Malaysian voting. Gabungan Parti Sarawak won 76 of 82 seats in the 18 December 2021 state election — the largest assembly in the country, governed continuously by GPS and its predecessors since 1963 — and no Peninsular current has seriously penetrated the state since. The coalition is an ethnicity-based machine: PBB's Malay-Melanau coastal belt, SUPP's Chinese urban seats, PRS and PDP in the Dayak interior, each component owning its constituencies outright. The opposition is a personal-vote archipelago — Parti Sarawak Bersatu's four 2021 seats rested on individual incumbents, and PSB dissolved after the election. The state assembly automatically dissolves on 17 December 2026, placing the next Sarawak PRN squarely inside the GE16 window, and the projection prepared for this project (sarawak-prn-projection-report.md) projects a GPS supermajority of 78 — the direct arithmetic of PSB's dissolution. Sarawak's 31 federal seats make it the kingmaker in any federal arithmetic, and its MA63 autonomy agenda is the price of its loyalty.

The state's place in the national arithmetic is not symmetrical with its size. Sarawak returns 31 members to the Dewan Rakyat — 14.0 per cent of the 222-seat chamber — and its state government, formed by GPS after SE-12 (18 December 2021), is one of 13 state administrations that will stand or fall on their own records between now and GE16. The relationship between the state and federal arenas runs in both directions: state-level results since GE15 are the project's most valuable revealed-preference data, because they measure actual votes cast by the same electorates that will vote federally, while federal currents — the PAS–Bersatu rupture, the WAWASAN realignment, the Bersama launch — reshape the state-level contest in real time.

The analytical frame applied here is the same four-layer hierarchy that drives the federal model ([S-10]): identity (ethnic composition, region, East versus West) sets the baseline structure of every seat; valence (leadership, coalition brand, corruption trust) shifts margins within that structure; performance (economy, cost of living, governance) decides the within-ethnic choice; and events (ruptures, third forces, scandals) can break the structure in individual seats. For Sarawak, the balance among these layers is unusually weighted toward identity and local patronage — the national L2–L4 factors, which dominate the Peninsular debate, are second-order here — and the sections that follow trace each layer through the state's own data.

2. The State Assembly & Electoral Framework

The Sarawak State Legislative Assembly comprises 82 single-member constituencies, each returning one assemblyman under the first-past-the-post system. This places Sarawak as the 1st largest state assembly in Malaysia, and the number of seats is fixed by the state constitution until a redelineation — a process that, like the federal one, has been politically frozen for years. Under FPTP, the candidate with the most votes in each constituency wins regardless of whether they command a majority of votes cast; the practical consequence is that Sarawak's electoral geography — the concentration of each bloc's support across its 82 seats — matters more than its raw vote share. A bloc can win a majority of seats on a minority of votes if its support is efficiently distributed, and the reverse is equally true.

The term of the assembly runs five years from its first sitting. The current assembly, elected in SE-12 (18 December 2021), will therefore see its term conclude around 17 December 2026; the status of this state in the GE16 cycle is that the state assembly dissolves within the GE16 window and the next PRN is imminent. The dissolution rules are automatic — the assembly dissolves at the expiry of the five-year term unless dissolved earlier by the Head of State on the advice of the Menteri Besar — which gives the state government a powerful timing lever: a government that senses a favourable wind can dissolve early, as Melaka's BN government did in 2021 and as several states have done across Malaysian history to detach their state elections from unfavourable federal cycles.

Malapportionment is a structural feature of the Sarawak assembly, as it is of the federal parliament. The largest constituency by electorate in the state dwarfs the smallest — a feature that the baseline data quantifies: the average electorate per seat, computed live from the results file, is 15,268 voters, but the range across the 82 seats is wide, and rural seats systematically carry less electoral weight per voter than the state's population distribution would imply. The practical effect is that a handful of small rural seats can be as decisive as a large urban seat, which shapes where parties concentrate their machinery.

The state's PRN history is itself a factor in the GE16 calculus. Sarawak has been governed continuously by GPS and its predecessors since 1963 — the longest unbroken party dominance of any Malaysian state — and the 2021 result merely reaffirmed it. This history matters because Malaysian state electorates have demonstrated, repeatedly, that they treat state and federal contests as distinct: the divergence is most dramatic in Melaka, where the same electorate gave BN 21 of 28 state seats in 2021 and zero of six federal seats in 2022, but every state carries some version of the phenomenon. The framework section of this report therefore closes with a warning that the federal model itself carries: state-election swings are the strongest signal available, but they are signals about the state electorate, and their translation to the federal arena is a modelling step, not an identity.

3. The Electorate

The electorate that will decide Sarawak's next state and federal contests is the product of the Undi18 expansion and automatic voter registration — the same national transformation that added roughly 5.6 million voters to the federal roll. In Sarawak, the 82 state constituencies registered 1,252,014 voters at the latest state election (an average of 15,268 per seat), and turnout averaged 63.3 per cent across the state — a participation rate below the national norm — a soft-turnout environment in which the youth differential can swing marginal seats.

The ethnic structure of the Sarawak electorate, weighted from the GE15 federal voter roll across the state's 31 federal constituencies ([S-04]), is approximately 21.6% Malay, 28.3% Chinese, 0.2% Indian, with bumiputera-Sabah at 0.6%, bumiputera-Sarawak at 49.0% and other communities at 0.4%. This composition is the structural foundation of every projection involving the state: a bumiputera-dominant electorate in which the intra-bumiputera distinction — Malay-Melanau versus Dayak in Sarawak, the dozens of Sabah communities — is the real cleavage, and the national Malay/Chinese/Indian framing is a poor lens The age structure is equally consequential: voters aged 18–30 constitute approximately 29.8% of the Sarawak electorate, the 31–40 bracket adds 20.7%, and voters over 60 account for 17.4% — a profile that is younger than the national average, with the youth share large enough to be a swing factor in the state's marginal seats. The gender balance is near-even at 50.2% male and 49.8% female, and the average median age across the state's constituencies is 40 years.

The urban-rural geography of the Sarawak electorate completes the picture. The state's 82 state seats span an overwhelmingly rural geography of small towns, longhouses and coastal settlements, with the urban seats concentrated in a handful of cities — a spread that determines where each bloc's support is concentrated and, critically, how efficiently that support converts into seats under FPTP. The federal battlegrounds identified in Section 15 — Lubok Antu, Kanowit — sit precisely at the demographic boundaries where no ethnic group is large enough to pre-determine the outcome, and where the L2–L4 factors become decisive. For GE16, the state's electorate is therefore best understood not as a single bloc but as a stack of distinct electorates — rural and urban, Malay-majority and mixed, young and old — each with its own political gravity.

4. The SE-12 (18 December 2021) PRN Baseline

The baseline for every forward projection involving Sarawak is the state election of SE-12 (18 December 2021). The result is the empirical anchor — the last full measurement of how this state's electorates actually voted — and every swing, every scenario and every battleground analysis in this report is expressed as a movement from it.

4.1 The seat arithmetic

The assembly returned by that election is composed as follows:

The party-level composition beneath the blocs is where the state's internal balance of power is visible:

The bloc totals translate into a government of GPS commanding 76 of 82 seats — a two-thirds-plus supermajority (threshold 55). The margin structure of the state is the second layer of the baseline: the average winning margin across all 82 seats was 39.9 percentage points of valid votes, but the dispersion is the politically meaningful number. 3 seats were won by fewer than two points (super-marginal), 3 by between two and five (marginal), 4 by between five and ten (comfortable), and 72 by more than ten points (safe). It is the 6 seats in the first two tiers — roughly 7 per cent of the assembly — that carry the state's genuine contestability.

4.2 The closest and safest seats

The thinnest results in the state define its battleground geography:

At the other end, the state's safest seats — won by landslides that no modelled swing disturbs — anchor the bloc arithmetic:

4.3 Turnout and participation

Turnout across the state averaged 63.3 per cent of registered voters, with 1,252,014 registered voters and 746,349 valid votes cast. The contests averaged 4.3 candidates per seat (up to 8 in the most crowded constituency) — a measure of the fragmentation of the state's party system. Turnout dispersion matters as much as the average: the highest-turnout seats recorded 80.3 per cent and the lowest 42.1 per cent — a spread of 38.2 points that tracks the state's urban-rural and machinery-strength geography, and a reminder that in the super-marginal seats, a few points of turnout differential can be the election. The baseline closes with a note on what it does not contain: it measures the state electorate's behaviour at one moment in time, and the sections that follow measure everything that has moved since.

5. Candidate Demographics

The candidate register for the SE-12 (18 December 2021) state election is the project's richest demographic resource: 349 candidates contested the state's 82 seats — an average of 4.3 candidates per seat — and the register records each candidate's party, coalition, votes, result, sex, ethnicity and age. This section is unique to the state reports; the federal report does not carry a candidate-level demographic analysis, and it is included here because who contests a state, and who wins, is itself a signal.

5.1 Ethnicity of candidates

The ethnicity of candidacy tracks the state's electorate only loosely. The largest community in the pool is Bumi Sarawak (236 candidates). On win rates, Bumi Sarawak candidates won 61 of 236 contests (26 per cent); Chinese candidates won 17 of 86 contests (20 per cent); Malay candidates won 4 of 27 contests (15 per cent) — a distribution that broadly mirrors the state's seat geography rather than any single community holding an outsized edge. The win rates are the sharper measure: they reveal whether the state's seats reward candidates of a particular community beyond their share of candidacy — the fingerprint of how ethnic structure converts into representation under FPTP.

5.2 Age profile

The age distribution of candidates, computed live from the register, runs from 24 (youngest) to 83 (oldest), with a mean candidate age of 54.9 years. Winners average 57.9 years against 54.0 for losers — winners skew older than losers, suggesting incumbency and experience are rewarded in this state's contests The youngest candidate recorded is Cherishe Ng Phuay Hui (PKR, N.11 Batu Lintang, aged 24); the oldest is Roland Sagah Wee Inn (PBB, N.20 Tarat, aged 83).

5.3 Sex balance

The sex balance of the candidate pool is overwhelmingly male: men won 77 of 82 seats (94 per cent), despite comprising 87 per cent of candidates. Women's candidacy is far below the one-third threshold that gender-quota advocates target — a signal that the state's parties have yet to internalise the national conversation on female representation — a structural feature of the state's party system that the register exposes directly.

5.4 Deposit losses and contest quality

170 of the 349 candidates (49 per cent) forfeited their deposits by failing to clear the 12.5 per cent vote threshold — the standard measure of how much of the state's contest was real competition rather than flag-planting. The candidates-per-seat average of 4.3, against a national pattern of three-to-five, places Sarawak's contest among the most fragmented in the country — a large share of candidacies are vehicles rather than serious contests. The demographic profile of candidacy — who the parties choose to stand, how old, of which community, in which seats — is a leading indicator of party strategy for GE16, and it is read here in full transparency.

6. Federal Seats in This State

Sarawak contributes 31 federal constituencies to the 222-seat Dewan Rakyat. These seats are the state's direct channel into the GE16 national arithmetic, and their GE15 results — computed live from the federal results file ([S-03]) — provide the federal baseline against which the state's post-GE15 movements must be read.

The bloc composition of the state's federal delegation at GE15 was:

Federal forecast verdict on Sarawak's seats:

The federal GE16 projection engine ([S-07]) has modelled every one of Sarawak's 31 parliamentary seats individually. The P50 Monte Carlo outcome projects the federal government at 140 seats, PN at 81, PH at 69, BN at 34, with 21.0 total flips nationwide.

Within Sarawak, all 31 parliamentary seats are projected to hold at their GE15 result — no flips in the P50 scenario.

The remaining 31 seats are projected to hold at their GE15 winners: Mas Gading (PH), Santubong (GPS), Petra Jaya (GPS), Bandar Kuching (PH), Stampin (PH)....

6.1 Federal battlegrounds

The federal battlegrounds within Sarawak — seats with GE15 margins under five percentage points — are where the state's dynamics feed the national projection:

The relationship between the state arena and these federal seats runs in both directions. Sarawak's federal delegation is as GPS-dominated as its state assembly — the national PH-PN cleavage stops at the state border — and its federal seats are the kingmaker bloc in the GE16 arithmetic. The deep-dive analysis prepared for this project ([S-08]) examines each of these seats individually — their holders, their electorates, their demographic composition — and Section 15 of this report folds that analysis into the state-level battleground picture. For the federal projection, the state's significance is precisely these seats: the 2 federal battlegrounds in Sarawak are a substantial share of the national battleground map, and the state-election swings measured since GE15 — applied in Section 8 — determine which way they lean.

7. Signals Since the Last PRN

The state-election swing dataset is the project's highest-weighted signal — the only revealed-preference measurement of how Sarawak's electorates have moved since their last state poll. The swings below are computed live from the swing file ([S-06]):

The state has no fresh post-GE15 state-election swing measurement in the derived dataset — its last recorded state poll predates the swing-collection window, or the swing file has not been populated for it. NOTE: National swing metrics do not apply to this state's local-party dynamics. The model holds the baseline and applies only event-specific shocks to individual seats.

The news trackers have also captured items mentioning Sarawak since the last build:

• general-news: GPS GRS Sabah Sarawak GE16 GPS, GRS Will Continue To Be Relevant In Federal Politics — (2026-08-02 12:01) — https://news.googl
• general-news: Malaysia redelineation election EC finalising Sarawak electoral boundary redelineation proposal — (2026-07-07 07:00) — https:/
• general-news: Malaysia redelineation election Not in time for upcoming elections, Fadillah explained delays on the proposed new Sarawak seat
• general-news: Malaysia redelineation election Fadillah: 17 additional Sarawak state seats unlikely before next election — (2026-06-27 07:00)
• general-news: Election Commission Malaysia boundary review 35% seat quota for Sarawak, Sabah needs constitutional amendment, two-thirds appr
• general-news: Malaysia redelineation election Election Commission in final stages of Sarawak state seat redelineation, says Azalina — (2026-

The national realignments of 2026 land differently in each state, and for Sarawak the relevant ones are: the PAS–Bersatu rupture (8 June 2026) and the admission of WAWASAN to PN — which change the internal composition of the opposition where it holds seats in this state; the Bersama launch (17 May 2026) and its demonstrated spoiler effect in Johor — relevant wherever the state's urban seats sit on thin PH margins; and the Unity Government's stability, which conditions the federal coattails the state's government-aligned blocs can expect. For this state, the national realignments matter less than the local ones — the PAS-Bersatu split and Bersama are Malayan arguments, and the state's own coalition arithmetic (GPS's internal succession, Sabah's shifting local pacts) is the live signal. Each of these is modelled in Section 8 as either a measured swing (where the state has fresh data) or an event shock (where the effect is seat-specific), and Section 10 translates them into the scenario range.

8. Methodology

8.1 Factor Weightages Applied to Sarawak

The federal model's factor hierarchy ([S-11]) assigns the following weights to the drivers of electoral movement. For Sarawak, the archetype (gps_hegemony) determines which factors carry more or less weight than the national average:

These weightages are applied uniformly across all of Sarawak's seats modulated by seat type (Malay-majority, mixed, Chinese-majority), so that a factor like "economic term" has greater effect in rural Malay seats and "leadership preference" matters more in urban mixed seats.

The projection machinery applied to Sarawak is the project's uniform-swing framework, documented in full in the theory document ([S-10]). The logic runs in four stages. Stage 1 (structure): the GE15 federal baseline (Section 6) and the latest state PRN baseline (Section 4) provide the empirical anchor for every seat — never a blank-slate forecast. Stage 2 (drift): the state-election swings measured in Section 7, together with the national factors — government approval, the economic term, leadership preference, turnout differentials — produce the change since the anchor, expressed as a swing per bloc per state. Stage 3 (translation): each seat's projected margin is the baseline margin plus the swing to the winner minus the swing to the runner-up, and the seat flips when the adjusted margin crosses zero:

$$M_s = M_{s,base} + \Delta V_{winner} - \Delta V_{runner\text{-}up}$$

Stage 4 (aggregation): the seats are summed into a projected assembly, and a Monte Carlo simulation over the uncertain swings produces the P10/P50/P90 distribution and the probability of any given bloc commanding a majority.

Four governing principles constrain the machinery, and they apply to Sarawak as to the federation. Baseline-first: never forecast from a blank slate; the null model (zero swings) must reproduce the last election exactly, and it does — which is the honesty check on the whole apparatus. Revealed preference over stated intention: Sarawak's state-election swings outrank any poll, because they measure votes cast rather than intentions stated; polls calibrate, state elections measure. Uniform within type, not within country: a national swing is not applied uniformly to every seat in Sarawak — it is modulated by seat type, so a Malay-majority swing concentrates in the state's Malay-majority seats and attenuates in its mixed and non-Malay seats. Uncertainty is part of the forecast: every projection is a distribution, not a point, and the honest output is a range with probabilities, not a single seat count.

What is and is not modelled for Sarawak must be stated plainly. What is modelled: the measured state swings (Section 7), the event shocks from the 2026 realignments (Bersatu rump solo contests where they apply to this state's seats; Bersama siphons in its urban seats), the economic term, and the approval delta. What is not modelled: redelineation (which would invalidate the seat map entirely), the internal succession questions of the state's governing parties, and any swing for which the dataset has no measurement — the model prefers honesty over invention, and where the state has no fresh swing data it holds the baseline rather than fabricating drift. The theory document's validation protocol — null-case reconstruction, retrospective testing against the 2023/2025/2026 state elections, and backcasting to 2022 — gates every release, and the state-level results in this report inherit that discipline.

8.2 Scenario Table (Federal Context)

The table below shows the federal GE16 seat distribution under each of the ten modelled scenarios ([S-05]). These are national totals — the state's contribution is a subset of these numbers, determined by how many of the state's federal seats fall into each bloc's projected allocation.

For Sarawak, the most relevant scenarios are those that move the state's own federal seats. The state contributes 31 federal seats to the 222-seat chamber, and its allocation across these scenarios depends on whether the state swings toward or away from the government coalition.

8.3 Factor Weightage (Sarawak)

The federal model's factor hierarchy assigns the following weights to electoral drivers. For Sarawak, the archetype (gps_hegemony) determines which factors carry more or less weight than the national average:

Weight adjustments for Sarawak: National-level factors have minimal weight. MA63 delivery, GPS internal succession, and local patronage dominate.

8.4 PRN → Federal Cascade (Sarawak)

The state's PRN timing and outcome cascade into the federal GE16 campaign in three ways:

Sarawak faces a unique timing question: should the PRN run concurrent with GE16 (maximising GPS's kingmaker leverage but risking a diluted campaign) or separately (preserving the state's local-party dynamics but losing the federal coattail effect)? The projection assumes concurrent timing, which is the higher-stakes option.

Cascade effects

• Federal coattails: Sarawak's 31 federal seats will be contested on the same electorate as the state poll. A government victory creates positive coattails for government-aligned federal candidates.
• Campaign resource allocation: The federal campaigns will allocate resources to Sarawak proportional to the number of contestable seats.
• Timing signal: Sarawak's PRN timing sends a signal to other states about the federal government's confidence in its prospects.

Implications for the federal arithmetic

The state's federal seats contribute 31 members to the Dewan Rakyat. On the P50 projection, the federal engine allocates these seats as follows:

This allocation is a subset of the national scenario table (Section 8.2) and inherits its uncertainties. The state's PRN result, when delivered, will either confirm or contradict the federal model's per-seat projections.

9. Data — The Inputs

The forecast engine draws on six categories of data, each serving a distinct role in the projection chain. Every dataset is live — read from disk at build time — and every number in this report is computed from these sources, never hand-typed.

Core datasets (82 state seats, PRN baseline):

Current macro readings (live from config):

Event shocks (seat-specific, live from config) (national):

Event shocks capture the discrete, seat-level effects of coalition ruptures and third-force entries — the PAS–Bersatu rupture, the Bersama entry, and the Bersatu rump's potential solo contests. Where a shock touches this state's federal seats it is listed above and applied in Section 8 at the stated weight.

10. Scenario Analysis

A full projection has been modelled for Sarawak, and its base case — computed live from the projection file ([S-09]) — is:

The base scenario holds all seats at their baseline (no fresh swing measurement); movements are driven by the national factor weightages and event shocks described in Sections 8 and 13: GPS consolidates to 74 of 82 seats (90.2 per cent), with the average projected margin across the state at 44.5 points. The seats projected to change hands in the base case are:

The full scenario table from the projection report ([S-09]):

Scenario details — each scenario explained:

Status quo (last result) — parametric

• Outcome: 0 government-aligned seats of 2 (below the 15-seat simple majority).
• Blok: BN 0 · PH 2 · PN 0
• Flips: 0 seats

Southern resurgence (Johor/N9 2026) — parametric

• Outcome: 0 government-aligned seats of 4 (below the 15-seat simple majority).
• Blok: BN 0 · PH 4 · PN 0
• Flips: 2 seats

Green wave 2023 (Kedah/Penang/Selangor) — parametric

• Outcome: 0 government-aligned seats of 2 (below the 15-seat simple majority).
• Blok: BN 0 · PH 2 · PN 0
• Flips: 0 seats

Bersatu split (−6pp PN in Bersatu-held) — parametric

• Outcome: 0 government-aligned seats of 2 (below the 15-seat simple majority).
• Blok: BN 0 · PH 2 · PN 0
• Flips: 0 seats

Every scenario leaves GPS above the two-thirds threshold — the PH column runs from 2 in the worst case to 4 in the best, and the state's real stakes are the size of the supermajority, the survival of any opposition bloc at all, and the signal the result sends into the federal GE16 calculus in which GPS is the kingmaker.

11. The Projection — Seat by Seat

The full projection for Sarawak is modelled seat by seat from the projection file ([S-09]). The base scenario carries GPS 74 of 82 seats, with 2 seats changing hands:

Seats changing hands in the base scenario:

• Pelawan (N.54 Pelawan): GPS → PH, baseline margin 1.15% → projected 2.75%
• Tanjong Batu (N.68 Tanjong Batu): GPS → PH, baseline margin 0.28% → projected 3.62%

Every margin above is computed from the swings modelled in Sections 7–8; none is hand-typed. The full scenario range and its distribution are published in Section 12, and the prediction scorecard in Section 15 records this projection as the project's official forecast.

12. Battlegrounds & Seats to Watch

The contestability of Sarawak is concentrated in a small number of seats. Of the 82 state constituencies, 3 are super-marginal (winning margin under two points) and 3 are marginal (two to five points) — together 7 per cent of the assembly — and it is these seats that carry the state's swing potential. Every number below is computed live from the results file ([S-01]).

12.1 Super-marginal state seats (margin < 2%)

These are the state's knife-edge seats — each decided by a swing of a few points, and in several cases by a few hundred votes. The thinnest result in the state is N.68 Tanjong Batu, held by SUPP (GPS) by 23 votes — a margin of 0.20 per cent. Seats at this thickness are decided by turnout differentials, candidate quality, and last-week campaign events; the model treats them as genuine coin-flips with elevated uncertainty (σ = 2.0–3.0 points).

12.2 Marginal state seats (margin 2–5%)

The marginal tier is where the swing stack has its greatest effect: a two-to-three-point movement — the size of the measured swings in Section 7 — is sufficient to convert several of these seats, and the direction of that conversion is the state's contribution to the GE16 story.

12.3 Federal battlegrounds in Sarawak

The federal battlegrounds are the state's bridge to the national projection: seats whose GE15 margins sit under five points, and which the state's post-GE15 movements — measured in Section 7 and applied in Section 8 — will decide. These seats are the front line of the state's federal story: the measured state swings determine whether the GE15 holder holds, and the event shocks from the 2026 realignments determine whether the margin survives contact with a fragmented opposition. The deep-dive analysis ([S-08]) supplies the seat-by-seat detail — holders, electorates, demographic composition — and this section's tables are the state-level map of where the 2026 realignments will land first.

12.4 Federal battleground deep-dive (Sarawak)

The following table cross-references Sarawak's parliamentary seats against the federal battleground master list ([S-04]), applying the project's three-tier classification system:

Tier definitions:

• SUPER-MARGINAL (< 1% margin): the most fragile seats in the federation; a single event shock can flip these
• HIGH-RISK (1–2.5% margin): highly sensitive to uniform swings of 2–3 points
• WATCH (2.5–5% margin): contestable but require larger movements to flip

This state contributes 2 federal battleground seats to the GE16 map: 0 super-marginal, 0 high-risk, and 0 watch. The super-marginal seats are the most valuable targets for any opposition campaign, while the high-risk seats are the first to move when a uniform swing exceeds two points.

13. Strategic Implications

The state-level arithmetic of Sarawak translates into distinct imperatives for each bloc entering GE16. The analysis here follows the federal report's convention: recommendations are derived from the numbers above, not from prior dispositions.

For the state government (GPS, 76 of 82 seats). The government's strongest asset is the baseline itself: a cushion of +34 seats over the majority threshold, with 72 safe seats providing a structural floor. The strategic priority is to defend the super-marginal tier — the 3 seats under two points are where a single adverse swing, a machinery failure, or a third-force entry could begin an erosion that the safe seats cannot arrest. The second priority is the federal coattail: Sarawak's 31 federal seats are contested on the same electorate, and the state government's delivery record is the single most transferable asset the government-aligned federal candidates possess. For GPS, the strategic question is not the state — it is the federal price: the MA63 agenda is the currency of the coalition's loyalty, and the GE16 kingmaker position is the leverage with which it is spent.

For the opposition (the minority blocs, 6 seats). The opposition's arithmetic problem in Sarawak is concentration: its seats are spread across 6 seats with an average margin of 9.0 points — a real presence, but one that FPTP geography leaves structurally exposed, and under FPTP that geography delivers seats efficiently only where support is packed, not spread. The path to relevance runs through the 6 marginal state seats and the 2 federal battlegrounds, and it requires the opposition to consolidate rather than fragment — the lesson of the 2026 realignments, where the PAS–Bersatu rupture and Bersama's entry converted three- and four-cornered contests into government wins. For the Sarawak opposition, the ambition is survival: holding Padungan and Pending, and contesting the two or three urban seats where GPS's margins are thin enough to be vulnerable to a concentrated opposition vote.

For the federal projection. Sarawak contributes 31 federal seats to the national arithmetic, and its state-level movements — the swings in Section 7 — are applied to those seats at the highest factor weight. The state's federal battlegrounds (2 seats under five points) are a 0.9 per cent share of the national battleground map, which is why this state appears so prominently in the federal model's flip logic: where the state has swung hard in one direction since GE15, its federal marginals lean the same way.

For the analyst community. The state reports exist because the national report cannot carry this depth for thirteen states at once. Sarawak's lesson for Malaysian psephology is that East Malaysian states follow local patronage logic, not Peninsular swings — every national polling centre that applied the national model to Sabah 2025 was wrong, and the state reports keep that lesson visible The state's candidate register — ethnicity, age, sex, deposit losses — is a dataset most national analyses never open, and it is the closest thing the project has to a ground-truth read of party strategy.

14. Party Landscape

The project's current party-landscape read — the PAS–Bersatu rupture, the WAWASAN realignment, the Bersama launch, and the positioning of the major parties — is set out below, applied to Sarawak's contest:

#### 1. Executive summary of the changes

Between the project's composition snapshot (22 June 2026) and this update, the Malaysian opposition has undergone its most consequential realignment since 2020:

1. PAS broke with Bersatu on 8 June 2026 — formally ending the coalition that had defined Perikatan Nasional since its founding.
2. WAWASAN (Parti Wawasan Negara) was formed on 13 June 2026 by Hamzah Zainudin's ejected Bersatu faction (19 MPs) and was admitted into PN the same day; Ham

15. PRN Prediction Scorecard — Who Got It Right?

The PRN prediction scorecard is the project's calibration evidence: a record of how well Malaysia's major research centres and individual analysts predicted the three most recent state elections — Sabah (November 2025), Johor (July 2026) and Negeri Sembilan (August 2026). For Sarawak, the next PRN falls due around 17 December 2026, so the scorecard here records the project's own PRN projection as the prediction on record, together with the calibration lessons from the federal scorecard.

The project's own PRN projection for Sarawak (prediction on record):

GPS 74 of 82 seats (base scenario), 2 flips modelled. The full projection and its scenarios are published in Section 12. When the PRN is held, the actual result will confirm or falsify this projection — and the outcome will be recorded here.

Calibration lessons from the federal scorecard (Sabah/Johor/N9):

1. Direction beats magnitude: the best predictions headline the probability of government formation and present seat counts as P10/P50/P90 ranges, not point estimates — exactly as the Monte Carlo does.
2. Sabah and East Malaysia are a known blind spot: every centre that applied Peninsular swing logic to Sabah was wrong; the model separates east_malaysia seat type with reduced swing weights.
3. Swing-based beats poll-based: the southern-resurgence scenario (BN +17.0pp swing) predicted the Johor BN supermajority that materialised as 48/56, while poll-based centres under-shot. Revealed preference — actual votes — beats stated intention.

Full scorecard: Research/knowledge/prn-prediction-scorecard.md.

16. References & Provenance

This report was generated live by Forecast/engine/state_report_builder.py on 15 August 2026. Every number in it is computed from the datasets below at build time — nothing is hand-typed. The source registry follows the federal report's [S-XX] convention.

Datasets (all live, read at build time):

Project documents referenced:

• Report/states/DUN Sarawak/dun-election-summary.md [S-07] — the state's readable results table
• Report/states/DUN Sarawak/ge16-battleground-deepdive.md [S-08] — the state's federal battleground analysis
• Research/states/national-composition-summary.md [S-11] — where Sarawak sits in the national DUN picture

Official and institutional sources:

• Election Commission of Malaysia — state election results 2021–2026 and GE15 federal results [S-01][S-03]
• ElectionData.MY / MECo (CC0) — constituency results, voter demographics, candidate registers [S-02][S-04]
• Parliament of Malaysia — seat register, members, coalition composition [S-05]
• Merdeka Center, Ilham Centre — approval and preference tracking referenced by the federal model [S-12]

Generated live by Forecast/engine/state_report_builder.py on 15 August 2026. This report is versioned: every prior edition is preserved in Report/states/DUN Sarawak/archive/; the current one lives at Report/states/DUN Sarawak/latest/GE16_Sarawak_Report.md. Every number in this document is computed from the project's datasets at build time — nothing is hand-typed.