A senior member of Dr Mahamudu Bawumia’s flagbearer team, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, says the New Patriotic Party (NPP) entered its internal contest fully aware of the strength of every candidate.

The former Information Minister was emphatic that his side deliberately avoided complacency at every stage of the campaign.

Speaking on Joy News’ PM Express on Monday, he stated that the Bawumia team did not assume an easy path to victory and treated the contest as highly competitive from the outset.

“We didn’t go into this exercise underestimating any of the contestants,” he said. “We were pretty clear in our minds that the candidates would give us a run for our money.”

Dr Bawumia was declared the winner of the NPP flagbearer race by the Electoral Commission after securing 56.48 per cent of the total votes cast, earning the mandate to lead the party into the 2028 general elections.

The Offoase Ayirebi MP stated that the campaign’s confidence was not based on assumptions or optics, but on continuous data collection and voter feedback.

“Even for those who were not busily criss-crossing the country and doing all the 276 constituencies, we kept tracking messages and responses to messages,” he said.

According to him, the campaign relied heavily on research to understand voter concerns, sentiment, and reaction to competing messages across the party.

“And it was the kind of response we’re getting to all of these, may I say, rounds or bouts of research that were informing our messaging in the first place and our strategy in the second place,” he said.

He explained that this approach shaped both what the campaign chose to say and what it deliberately refrained from addressing.

“So you would find that our message was in a particular direction,” he said, adding that the team resisted distractions even when provoked.

“No matter the kind of headwinds that came or attempts to take us off course, even to respond, we would not respond,” he said.

Oppong Nkrumah stressed that this restraint extended to the candidate himself.

“Our candidate himself will not respond,” he said.

He said that the decision was not accidental but driven by research that consistently pointed to what mattered most to voters within the party.

“Because the research gave us indication of what was the pain point or the concern of the voters,” he said.

As a result, the campaign focused narrowly on addressing those concerns rather than reacting to attacks or counter-narratives.

“And so our exercise was focused on responding to,” he said.

The remarks offer insight into the internal mechanics of Dr Bawumia’s campaign, highlighting a strategy centred on discipline, message control, and data-driven decision-making, rather than on loud exchanges or personality clashes.

They also underscore why the Bawumia team believes the victory was earned through method rather than momentum.

For Oppong Nkrumah, the contest was never about who shouted the loudest or travelled the most miles, but about understanding the party's mood and responding with precision.

The outcome, he suggested, reflects a campaign that stayed its course, trusted its research, and never took its competitors lightly.