The head of the Government of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum, declared yesterday that the federal capital was “workerist”, because more than 90% of those who voted in the referendum for the revocation of the mandate, did so so that his six-year term would end. The pre-candidate for the Presidency spoke with half truths, but they do not hide what she owed to her political boss and mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The results of this Sunday’s vote, contrary to what Sheinbaum expressed, marked the continuation of the weakening of López Obrador in his bastion, highlighted last year in the federal elections, when the opposition snatched half of the power from him in the federal capital. .
The growing annoyance of the people of the capital with López Obrador, who drags Sheinbaum, had led the president to seek to protect her in the face of what he hoped would be negative results in the federal capital. He made her responsible for the electoral operation in the states of the metropolitan area, the State of Mexico, Hidalgo, Morelos, Puebla and Tlaxcala, to compensate for the losses in the capital, but they were so significant that they have not been able to evaporate. In last year’s federal elections, López Obrador’s voting machine produced 22.1% less support than in the 2018 elections. Yesterday, the loss of sympathy and support at the polls continued.
With 97% of the minutes computed, the estimated vote that supported López Obrador was one million 358 thousand 28 votes, with an average participation of 16.70%, against one million 577 thousand 989 votes obtained by Morena in last year’s elections. , with a participation of 52.26%. Although elections have different characteristics, last year López Obrador was the elephant in the room on election day in 2021, where turnout reflected opposition activism and produced the huge punishment vote against Sheinbaum and the president. The consultation on the revocation of the mandate, on the other hand, was an exercise where the mobilization was fundamentally from the party structure.
What the head of government had to do was organize the structures, prepare the logistics and carry out an efficient mobilization. Sheinbaum had the open portfolio of the capital government to inject resources in a discretionary manner, in accordance with the instructions and the endorsement of López Obrador, but even this was not enough to reverse the downward trend in the capital’s polls. The number of votes that vanished in just 10 months was close to 145,000.
The president’s argument that the vote for less than 2018 was because the National Electoral Institute did not install all the polling stations it should have -which it did not do because Morena did not authorize the budget-, does not hold, because there were many polling stations this Sunday in the City of Mexico that had very little influx of voters, not only in the west of the capital, where they wanted to focus the annoyance against the president and the head of government, but in the north and in some parts of the east, which were believed to be under control of Morena.
In the entities that touch the great metropolitan area of Mexico City, except in Tlaxcala, where there was a significant loss of votes compared to last year’s elections, there was progress in supporting López Obrador. In Hidalgo, where the consultation coincided with the start of electoral campaigns for governor, the increase in votes for López Obrador and Morena was greater than 60,000, but in Morelos, as in Puebla, the vote increased by more than 100,000. But in the State of Mexico, which deserves a separate mention for being the entity with the greatest electoral weight, one million 750 thousand 622 people voted for López Obrador to remain in power, a figure lower by just over 143 thousand people who decided to remove him. your support or ignore the query.
In the State of Mexico, Sheinbaum and the chief of Texcoco, candidate for governor, Higinio Martínez, political chief of the Customs director, Horacio Duarte, and the Secretary of Education, Delfina Gómez, worked in coordination, but it was not enough either. The loss of votes in that entity and in Mexico City complicates the electoral scenario for López Obrador and Morena in the 2024 presidential elections, where the president will not appear on the ballot and his power will be more diminished by other objective realities, such as to economic stagnation and the loss of all control over security.
Mexico City was the fourth entity where there was the greatest rejection against President López Obrador. In the capital, 10.3% voted for the revocation -similar to the total in Guanajuato, a historically PAN entity, which in 2018 was the only one to vote against the president-, behind Nuevo León (15.8%), Jalisco (11.5% ) and Aguascalientes (19.8%). Seen in a more focused way, mayors where Morena has a strong ascendancy, such as Gustavo A. Madero and Venustiano Carranza, the vote for the revocation exceeded 13%, well above the national average, while only in six of the 24 districts in which the federal capital is divided, the vote for the permanence of López Obrador exceeded 90%.
The total numbers of votes were not what was expected neither in Mexico City nor in the entire metropolitan area, which will hurt Sheinbaum in the construction of his candidacy for the Presidency. As the mobilization and the results of the consultation are reviewed internally, his reliability may diminish, as the results obtained by López Obrador in other regions of the country begin to be compared. The consultation has served to measure the capacities and talents for mobilization, but above all, in the case of the president, to observe if his protégé Sheinbaum will be able to respond to the call he has made for ’24 and continue the legacy of the. Today, based on experience, Sheinbaum doesn’t have what it takes to pull it off.
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