The head of Government of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum, starts with the citizen’s favor in the race to replace Andrés Manuel López Obrador as Morena’s candidate for the country’s presidency. When asked who they prefer at the head of the official party, between 29% and 41% of the population answered that Sheinbaum. This advantage, common to all the surveys considered and analyzed in this piece (all of them carried out from April to this Friday), however, does not yet allow us to extrapolate a victory forecast. The three reasons for caution are the position of its immediate rivals, uncertainty about the details of the final method of election, and the special difficulty for a pollster to predict a swing election that interests mainly a particular part of the population. citizenship.
One of the three unknowns will be resolved this Sunday. The National Council of Morena is summoned to precisely define the deadlines and the methodology of the final survey that will decide who the winner is. A previous process closely followed by the president himself, in an attempt to avoid internal wear and tear. Regarding the starting position of the applicants, Marcelo Ebrard, who will leave the Foreign Ministry this Monday to be able to compete in the pre-campaign, is not far from Sheinbaum. It is true that in none of the 12 polls considered here does he surpass him, with the result that the lowest estimate for Sheinbaum exceeds the highest for Ebrard. But in almost all of them he is second, in most (with some significant exceptions) with a distance from third equal to or greater than the one the race leader has over him. Without a doubt, Ebrard and Sheinbaum are relying on their very high degree of recognition among the citizenry: they are, by far, the most familiar names in Mexican homes of all the caps.
Despite not having started the formal selection process yet, Morena’s applicants have been engaged in acts of low-intensity proselytism for months, including some darts between opponents. Chastened by the severe wear and tear caused by the internal battles during his career, López Obrador has taken the reins and wants to leave things tied up as soon as possible. First, he brought the calendar forward and what was going to be a long-distance race until almost the end of the year has become a sprint It will end, predictably, at the end of summer. A change that has affected, above all, Ebrard. The chancellor had more time to close the gap with the head of the capital and has been the first to announce his departure from office to fully engage in the pre-campaign. A decision that, for example, Sheinbaum has not yet formally announced.
In another action aimed at damage control, the president called the caps to a dinner this Monday to establish the road map and iron out tensions. López Obrador is supervising the internal process that, practically de facto, also involves the election of the next president of the country. Morena sweeps the opposition coalition Va por México by a two-to-one margin, according to average polls.
Beyond the two favourites, Senator Ricardo Monreal, Secretary of the Interior Adán Augusto López and Deputy Gerardo Fernández Noroña clearly belong to a different group, something to be expected insofar as none of them occupies such a visible position on the scene. politician such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the mayor’s office of the capital. The Ministry of the Interior (López) or the leadership of Morena in the Senate (Monreal) are prominent positions, but not at the same level of media exposure.
But it’s not just their fame: their favorability (measured as the subtraction of the percentage of Mexicans who have a positive and negative opinion about each one) has also improved in the last year. Especially that of Ebrard, it is possible to say, that in May it reached the levels that Sheinbaum had last August. The mayoress has grown, but less.
However, when looking at these graphs at such an early stage of the race, it is essential to do the mental exercise of projecting them into the future. López, Monreal and Fernández Noroña will likely gain notoriety as the race progresses, as they will be the subject of articles, debates, commentary, interviews and, in general, all the attention that comes with a crucial election like this. On the other hand, after a certain level of scrutiny and exposure, the normal thing is that the negatives go up, and the positives go down. Sheinbaum and Ebrard are more exposed to this possibility.
All this will happen as the campaign progresses, once the rules of the election are defined. The guidelines issued by López Obrador at dinner on Monday include that the caps resign their public positions as a condition to participate in the survey that will define the candidacy; that they sign a commitment that they will stay in the game and support the person who wins; that they propose polling companies they trust (which will later be drawn), and that they designate representatives in a committee that will monitor the entire process in a transparent manner.
The selection of pollsters will be one of the workhorses. The predictions of a handful of companies about the elections in the State of Mexico last week overestimated, on some occasions by more than 20 points, the final victory of the Morena candidate, Delfina Gómez. An excessively large gap that has raised suspicions within the formation. The president has also slipped that it will be a single survey and open to the entire population —not only to Morena supporters— but it is not yet closed whether it is a single question or multiple attributes will be addressed. The latter is the format defended, for example, by Sheinbaum, supported by the fact that it has been the format used by Morena on other occasions. Ebrard has raised, however, the need for a single question to be asked, in which citizens are directly questioned who they consider to be the best candidate for Morena in the 2024 presidential elections.
The challenge derived from this uncertainty for pollsters is enormous, and almost paradoxical. Preliminary surveys seek to simulate the final survey (or final surveys) to predict its result, but without knowing its rules or specific parameters, the question formulation cannot be adapted to resemble the final one. The variation of approximations can already be appreciated in the existing surveys today, which is precisely what for now makes it unwise to extract a simple or weighted average from the published surveys: they are not necessarily comparable to each other, as they are before a sharply defined voting as a presidential election. In the extreme, this methodological challenge could mean that a general preference expressed in a preliminary poll may not translate into a candidate’s choice in a final poll if the question is phrased differently. In addition, while the standards will be unveiled, this variation in methods will occur not only among pollsters, but within the same pollster, because they will all have incentives to adapt their methods to the final version. Polls adapted to the new rules may produce different results than initial polls, making it difficult to track trends and change in support for candidates.
And if the challenge due to the changes in the method is great, the modifications in the voter base may be even more so. To date, published surveys are based on representative samples for the entire Mexican population. But while not the entire country is necessarily interested in influencing Morena’s candidacy, there is a valid question as to to what extent the chosen sample represents the final universe of voters. If this is reduced and concentrated to a certain profile, in which one of the candidates now in second, third, fourth or fifth place turns out to be over-represented, today’s photo may end up significantly far from tomorrow’s reality.
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