The Verdict Filipinos Would Give - Wave 3

Executive Summary

This paper reports the third wave of Pulso Intelligence's weekly tracking of Filipino public opinion on the impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte. Wave 3 was fielded August 24–30, 2026 and is compared against Wave 2 (August 17–23, 2026). Two instruments are covered: a national reading of whether the public believes the Vice President is guilty, and a scorecard rating the twenty-one senator-judges hearing the case.

After a Wave 2 that edged toward conviction, Wave 3 moves the other way. The drift toward guilt stalled and partly reversed, the country's attention cooled, and public confidence in the senator-judges slipped almost across the board. Acquittal, which had been narrowing, reopened its lead.

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KEY FINDINGS

• Acquittal reopens its lead. “Not guilty” rose from 46.2% to 47.9% while “guilty” eased from 36.3% to 35.9%. The acquittal margin widened back from 9.9 to 12.0 points; the mean guilt rating slipped from 2.79 to 2.75 on the 1–5 scale.
• The committed held; the casual pulled back. Filipinos who follow the trial weekly (+0.6) and daily (+1.1) actually edged further toward guilt, but the disengaged moved the other way — “not interested” fell 2.6 points and occasional followers 1.9 points on guilt — driving the overall dip.
• Attention cooled. Daily following fell from 19.8% to 18.4% and the “not interested” share rose from 4.4% to 5.1% — a less-engaged week.
• West Visayas rose; Metro Manila and Mindanao eased. Guilty sentiment jumped +3.6 points in West Visayas but fell in Metro Manila (−1.8) and slid further in Mindanao, now in single digits (South 9.0%, North 8.2%).
• Trial fairness stays poor. Just 25.5% say the Senate is conducting the trial fairly, against 37.7% who call it unfair — essentially unchanged, and still net-negative.
• Confidence in the senator-judges slipped nearly across the board. Nineteen of twenty-one senators saw their overall rating fall versus Wave 2; only Imee Marcos edged up (+0.01) and Chiz Escudero held flat at 2.99. No senator clears the 3.0 midpoint.

Note on comparability. Wave 2 and Wave 3 both rate the senator-judges on a 1–5 scale, so their scores and rankings are directly comparable and the wave-on-wave change is reported here. (Wave 1 used a 1–3 scale and remains non-comparable.) The guilt and fairness questions use identical 1–5 wording across all waves.

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1.  Introduction & Objectives

The Senate impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte remains the dominant political story of 2026, and public sentiment around it continues to move week to week. Pulso Intelligence's Weekly Impeachment Tracker measures that movement on a fixed cadence with constant questions, so that change — not just level — can be read with confidence. Wave 3 is the third reading in the series.

This paper has three objectives: to establish where national opinion stands after Wave 3 and how it moved from Wave 2; to identify which segments of the public drove the movement; and to document how Filipinos now rate the individual senators serving as judges, including — for the first time — the wave-on-wave change in those ratings.

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2.  Methodology

Wave 3 was fielded August 24–30, 2026, through the Pulso Intelligence application. A total of 2,246 respondents were approved and 2,222 were weightable. Results are calibration-weighted to COMELEC 2025 National and Local Elections registered-voter benchmarks on Sex × Age × Region. The effective sample size after weighting is 1,788.3, a design effect of 1.241. For reporting, age is grouped into 18–30, 31–50 and 51+.

Wave 2 was fielded August 17–23, 2026 on the same instrument. The guilt question, the trial-fairness question, and — from Wave 2 onward — the senator-judge battery all use identical 1–5 wording, so Wave 2 and Wave 3 are directly comparable throughout this paper. Wave 1 (August 10–16) used a 1–3 senator scale and is excluded from senator comparisons.

A note on interpretation. This is an app-based, opt-in panel weighted to the national voter profile. Weighting improves representativeness but does not fully remove self-selection; week-on-week change is the more defensible statistic than any single absolute level, and figures are best read alongside the probability-based national pollsters.

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3.  The National Verdict: Guilt Perception

Asked whether Vice President Duterte is guilty or not guilty (rated 1–5, where 1–2 is “not guilty,” 3 is neutral and 4–5 is “guilty”), Filipinos moved back toward acquittal after Wave 2's drift the other way.

_{Table 1. National guilt perception, Wave 2 → Wave 3. Base: 2,222 weighted respondents.}

The acquittal margin — “not guilty” minus “guilty” — widened from 9.9 points in Wave 2 to 12.0 points in Wave 3, unwinding most of the previous week's compression. The movement is modest but coherent: acquittal gained (+1.7), the neutral middle thinned (−1.4), and guilt ticked down (−0.4). The Wave 2 momentum toward conviction did not carry into Wave 3.

Two framings matter. First, acquittal not only leads but has re-widened its advantage. Second, the neutral bloc — now 16.2%, its smallest in the series — is still large enough to be decisive, but it shrank this week as respondents moved off the fence, mostly toward “not guilty.”

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4.  What Moved: The Committed vs the Casual

Segmenting the change by how closely respondents follow the trial reveals a split beneath the small national dip. The most engaged did not retreat — they edged further toward guilt — while the disengaged pulled back toward acquittal, and it is the latter, larger group that moved the national number.

_{Table 2. Change in the share saying “guilty,” Wave 2 → Wave 3, by trial-following frequency (Q2 × Q3).}

Weekly and daily followers held their ground and even nudged toward guilt (+0.6 and +1.1), a continuation of the engagement-driven hardening seen in Wave 2. But the “not interested” group fell 2.6 points and occasional news-hearers 1.9 points on guilt, moving back to acquittal. Because these casual segments are far larger than the committed core, their retreat set the national direction. (The small “monthly” cell rose +3.8 but is the least stable.) The reading for Wave 3 is that the pullback was concentrated among Filipinos paying the least attention, in a week when attention itself declined.

Attention indeed cooled. Daily following fell from 19.8% to 18.4%, and those saying they are “not interested” rose from 4.4% to 5.1%, while weekly following held near 29%. A less-engaged public that drifts back toward its prior (acquittal) lean is the throughline of Wave 3.

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5.  Regional Patterns

The country's political geography held its shape — Luzon and Metro Manila most conviction-leaning, Mindanao overwhelmingly for acquittal — but the week's movement rearranged the edges.

_{Table 3. Guilt perception by region, Wave 3, with week-on-week change in the guilty share. All regional bases n ≥ 30.}

The clearest mover was West Visayas, where guilty sentiment rose +3.6 points to 37.0% — the only sizeable increase this wave. Metro Manila eased −1.8 (though it remains the most conviction-leaning region at 56.2%), and both Mindanao regions slid further toward acquittal, dropping into single digits on guilt (South 9.0%, North 8.2%). The vote-rich Luzon corridors of Central and South Luzon were essentially flat. In short, the small national pullback toward acquittal was driven by Metro Manila and Mindanao, partly offset by a conviction-ward move in West Visayas.

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6.  Demographic Patterns

The sex and age cleavages persist, with one notable shift among women.

_{Table 4. Guilt perception by sex and age, Wave 3.}

Women remain more conviction-leaning than men (38.1% vs 33.7% guilty), but the gap narrowed this week: women eased 2.5 points off guilt while men rose 1.8. The age pattern stays U-shaped and, if anything, sharpened at the top — the oldest Filipinos (51+) are the most conviction-leaning at 48.5% guilty (up 2.5 points), the youngest (18–30) sit at 41.8%, and the 31–50 middle cohort remains the most protective of the Vice President, with 54.4% saying not guilty. The persuadable middle of the electorate is, once again, the middle of the age range.

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7.  Perceived Fairness of the Trial

The public's read on the process barely moved and remains decidedly skeptical.

_{Table 5. Perceived fairness of the Senate trial, Wave 3 — national and selected regions.}

Only about one in four Filipinos (25.5%) consider the trial fair, statistically unchanged from Wave 2's 25.6%, against 37.7% who call it unfair (up a point) and 36.9% neutral. The geographic pattern matches guilt perception: perceived unfairness is highest in Mindanao (60.2% in South Mindanao) and lowest in Metro Manila (25.2%). A persistent, net-negative fairness read means any conviction that emerges will land before a public a large share of which already regards the proceedings as unfair — and that share is concentrated exactly where support for the Vice President is strongest.

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8.  The Senator Scorecard

Now comparable week-on-week. Because Wave 2 and Wave 3 share the 1–5 scale (5 = best), senator scores and rankings can be compared directly; the Δ column reports the change since Wave 2. Respondents rate each senator on fairness, performance and trust, each 1–5; the overall score is their mean.

Two things stand out. First, the field is still compressed and low — every senator sits below the 3.0 midpoint, from 2.39 to 2.99. Second, the direction is almost uniformly downward: nineteen of the twenty-one senators lost ground versus Wave 2.

_{Table 6. Senator-judge scorecard, Wave 3 (1–5 scale; overall = mean of the three dimensions), ranked by overall score, with change vs Wave 2.}

Francis “Chiz” Escudero holds the top spot at 2.99, unchanged, the only senator effectively at the midpoint. Below him the ranking barely reshuffled, but the levels drifted down: the sharpest declines were Raffy Tulfo (−0.09), Erwin Tulfo (−0.07) and a cluster at −0.06 (Gatchalian, Sotto, JV Ejercito). Only Imee Marcos rose, by a single hundredth. Read against Section 7, where a quarter of the public considers the trial fair, the scorecard describes a tribunal whose members are not only individually middling but, this week, slipping. Whether that reflects fatigue with a lengthening trial or specific dissatisfaction is a question for subsequent waves.

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9.  Contextual Backdrop

Unlike Wave 2, whose movement coincided with a single dominant news event — the Acosta confidential-funds testimony — Wave 3's field week produced no comparable revelation. The Senate hearings continued, but coverage was more diffuse, and the tracker's own attention measures fell. The most defensible contextual reading is therefore an absence: with no new bombshell to concentrate opinion, and with the least-engaged Filipinos tuning out, sentiment relaxed back toward its structural resting point of acquittal. As always, this is association rather than proven causation; a single wave cannot establish that a quieter news week caused the pullback.

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10.  Limitations

• Opt-in panel. Respondents are Pulso Intelligence app users weighted to the national voter profile. Weighting reduces but does not eliminate self-selection; treat week-on-week change as more reliable than absolute levels.
• Small subgroups. The 51+ band remains the smallest age cell and should be read as indicative even where it moves most.
• Fielding window inferred. The dataset labels this reading “Wave 3” without exact dates; the August 24–30 window is inferred from the tracker's weekly cadence and should be confirmed before publication.
• Association, not causation. Contextual observations are aligned with sentiment in time; the design does not establish causal effect.

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11.  Conclusion

Wave 3 is a reversion week. The tentative move toward a guilty verdict recorded in Wave 2 did not build; instead acquittal reopened a double-digit lead, the neutral middle thinned, and the country paid less attention. The people still watching most closely edged further toward conviction, but they are outnumbered by casual observers who drifted back to acquittal as the news quieted. Meanwhile the senator-judges, now measured on a stable scale, lost public confidence almost uniformly. The questions for Wave 4 are whether acquittal's re-widened lead is a floor or merely a pause, whether renewed testimony re-engages the disengaged, and whether the broad erosion in senator ratings continues or stabilises.

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