Colombia - First round presidential election results
Abelardo or Cepeda: Which candidate is closer to his ceiling?
The initial count of the first round results in Colombia’s presidential election are Abelardo de la Espriella 44%, Ivan Cepeda 41%, Paloma Valencia 7%. The results are unlikely to change much as the official count comes in.
I’ll be speaking about the election with an excellent panel during at an online event at 11AM EDT today. You can register here.
Campaigns and candidates matter
As I wrote last week, Paloma Valencia’s campaign collapsed. She did a poor job making the case for herself. She pivoted toward a moderate vice president and then clashed with him. She spent far too much time post-primary talking about Uribe. She failed to take on de la Espriella directly and did not land effective critiques against him. She made unforced errors during the final weeks of the campaign and appeared rattled as the polls turned against her.
The scale of collapse: Valencia won 3.2 million votes in the primary, and her vice presidential nominee, Juan Daniel Oviedo, won 1.2 million. Somehow, the pair only won 1.6 million in the general election. They underperformed their own primary results by almost three million voters.
This same question about candidates and campaigns matters moving into the second round. Ivan Cepeda has spent much of his career campaigning against Alvaro Uribe. Fortunately or unfortunately for the ruling party candidate, de la Espriella is not Uribe. Whether he can pivot to this new opponent is key. If Cepeda runs against de la Espriella as if the populist is a continuation of the Uribista right, his campaign will play right into de la Espriella’s hands. Cepeda’s initial speech last night was an enormous missed opportunity to redefine the race. Petro and Cepeda’s complaints about the results and hints of fraud make them look like sore losers rather than ready to compete in the second round.
Meanwhile, de la Espriella has momentum and didn’t make any errors yesterday. The fact that Paloma Valencia and Alvaro Uribe moved swiftly to endorse de la Espriella gave his campaign a nice additional boost on top of coming in first place.
High voter turnout. With a 58% voter turnout, there was strong interest in this first round. Second rounds usually turn out more voters than the first round, which could mean a modern record turnout for Colombia. There will be some small movement among centrists to cast null or blank ballots or sit out the election, but most voters will want to make a statement, even if it’s to vote against the “less bad” candidate.
Geography. As others have pointed out on social media, Colombia’s election results in 2026 look a lot like the 2016 vote on the FARC peace accord and the 2022 election. The geography of the left-right polarization in the country has stuck. At the same time, don’t ignore the numbers of Cepeda voters in Antioquia or de la Espriella voters along the Caribbean and Pacific coasts. The fact that some departments and regions lean a certain direction usually means they are 60-40 or 70-30 in favor of one side, not 100-0.
Scenarios
The second round will take place on 21 June. Imagine two extreme scenarios, one where de la Espriella wins 55-45 and the other where Cepeda wins 55-45. What’s the pre-mortem narrative on each scenario?
The case for de la Espriella
This was always an anti-incumbent election. Every voter who turned out against Cepeda in round one was voting in some way against the Petro government. They’ll continue to do so.
If that is true, the most direct analysis of where voters go suggests nearly all of the voters for Paloma Valencia and at least half of the voters for other candidates will move into the Abelardo column to vote against the ruling party candidate in round two.
Cepeda isn’t Petro, which may or may not be good as president, but certainly makes him a lousy candidate. He lacks the campaign skills. He’s also running from behind now.
Meanwhile, de la Espriella’s campaign has been a model of building momentum from nothing and could continue to surge. The candidate is traditional and social media savvy and has smart consultants who have gotten him this far and are ready to push him well past the finish line.
It’s only three weeks until the next round. For whatever vulnerabilities that de la Espriella has, he only needs to dodge them for 21 more days for his surge to bring him to the presidency.
For two-round election systems, the winner of the first round wins about two-thirds of the time. Prediction markets favor de la Espriella.
The case for Cepeda
Just like Colombia’s 2022 election, Petro’s coalition took over 40% in the first round and can build to over 50% in the second round. They have a national movement and narrative, while the right is divided and the center is disillusioned with both sides.
Unlike four years ago, the left has the entire machinery and resources of the government to support their campaign, and Petro is willing to use it. This has the potential to be an enormous (and arguably unfair) campaign advantage.
The anti-incumbent narrative is not as strong as in 2022. Petro’s approval rating today (around 45%) is significantly higher than Duque’s was in 2022 (under 30%) when the incumbent side lost.
Just like 2022, the left’s opponent is not the establishment right, but a surging rightwing populist who lacks a national party infrastructure and is largely untested in the national spotlight. He could collapse under the pressure and attention.
Further, de la Espriella is a far more vulnerable candidate than Rodolfo Hernandez was in 2022 given the number of scandals tied to him. Now that the votes have shown him to be the frontrunner, he’ll be under a spotlight in a way that will be significantly more challenging than in the first round.
Colombia 2014, Peru 2016, Chile 2021 - All examples of elections where the far right candidate came in first place in the first round and lost in the second round once the attention turned to their weaknesses. While no analogy exactly matches this year’s Colombian election, don’t assume it can’t happen again.
Final comments: What to watch?
Second round polls should be more accurate than first round polls. That is true because the second round is no longer “hypothetical,” which focuses respondents, and because polling firms can improve their turnout models based on the first round data. At the same time, there will only be a few second round polls, and they will miss any movement in the final week. In a three week campaign, that could be a lot of change.
Watch Cepeda’s campaign and its ability to be disciplined and focused. If they spend their time and energy talking about Uribe or about allegations of fraud, they’re missing the critical message they need to win.
Do voters, many of whom tell pollsters that corruption is their top issue, know everything about de la Espriella’s past? One big question, beyond Cepeda’s ability to go on the attack, is whether any new allegations surface in the coming weeks that drive his scandals to everyone’s attention. He only has to dodge it for three more weeks.
Combined, Fajardo and Oviedo could hypothetically move about 2 million centrist and swing votes (fewer in reality). If this election ends up closer to 50-50 than 55-45, either or both could be kingmakers. However, if they waffle, call for blank/null voting, or stick with a message that “both extremes are bad,” they miss out on that influence. Maybe that’s a good long-term political strategy if they assume both likely presidents will fail upon taking office (“don’t blame me, I didn’t vote for him”), but that attempt to remain neutral between the fray hasn’t worked for Fajardo in the past.
Petro is going to ramp up the fraud allegations (an issue I wrote about back in March). So will his opponents, claiming that they are abusing government resources or working with illegal groups to turn out voters. There is no credible evidence of fraud, but the hype could create a post-election crisis and could undermine the legitimacy of whoever wins.