Politics and Polls - 14 October 2020
New polls from Bolivia and Argentina
I cover recent polls every Wednesday. If you want to be added to the newsletter distribution list, please enter your email at https://boz.substack.com/ or email me at boz@substack.com and I will add you.
Two items today:
Bolivia - Final polls point to uncertainty on election night
Argentina - Polls show Fernandez down but his party leading the midterm vote
Bolivia - Final polls point to uncertainty on election night
Two final polls published in Bolivia largely confirmed the state of the race. Perhaps the most surprising thing to come out of the final weeks of the presidential campaign has been how consistent the polling has been. The Jubileo poll available on Tu Voto Cuenta matches the average of all the rest of the recent polls almost perfectly.
Ipsos: Arce 34, Mesa 28, Camacho 14.
Jubileo: Arce 34, Mesa 27, Camacho 14.
Above: Tu Voto Cuenta
Assuming the polls are relatively accurate, I estimate the final total of valid votes will be around Arce 43, Mesa 33 and Camacho 17. To be clear, there is a fair sized margin of error in those numbers.
Those numbers place the potential for a first round victory by Arce at too close to call. He is both near the ten point margin and close to the 45% threshold where he could win with a lesser margin of victory. Small last minute swings by undecided voters could determine the victor.
Perhaps more ominously, these polls suggest a high probability that whether Arce wins in the first round may not be known on the night of the election. As occurred in the 2019 election, the results may be so close that the quick count is indecisive and the results require additional votes to be counted or recounted from certain areas.
There is good evidence that Morales attempted to steal the 2019 election. The 2020 election should be better run given the people in charge of Bolivia’s TSE. But even then, there will be doubts and controversy in a close election.
It is possible that Arce legitimately wins after a lengthy vote counting process, but that many Bolivians don’t believe it (or choose to reject it out of political expediency) based on the 2019 experience.
Alternatively, it’s possible that Arce legitimately falls just short of a first round victory and his supporters protest with the belief that the system was rigged against him by the Añez government.
While I don’t think election fraud is likely given the precautions that have been taken and the monitors who will be watching, I also don’t trust the Añez government. People should listen to independent election observers and believe them if they report irregularities at the voting booths or in the count that could be significant enough to alter the results.
Any one of those would be a nightmare scenario for the country. Independent election observers are going to be necessary to help promote the legitimacy of the election, assuming it is clean, but those same independent election observers have lost credibility in the past year due to various disputes over the 2019 controversy.
At this point, we should all be cheering for either a clear victory by Arce or a clear overperformance by Mesa that leads to a competitive second round. Because if this turns out to be a narrow election in which we’re arguing over whether Arce’s margin of victory is 9.8% or 10.2% again (as the polls currently suggest), it’s going to be ugly.
Argentina - Polls show Fernandez down but his party winning the midterm vote
Two new polls from Poliarquia and Opina Argentina confirm the trends I wrote about two weeks ago. Though polls differ in terms of his approval rating - Poliarquia has Fernandez at 43% overall and Opina has him at 54% when asking about his management of the pandemic - the approval rating for Alberto Fernandez is falling in nearly every poll.
At the same time, both polls show the president’s party running more than ten points ahead of Juntos por el Cambio and other opposition parties in the midterm elections next year. No clear alternative has emerged.
Fernandez’s poll numbers are likely to drop further in the coming months given the falling economy and the currency devaluation that appears increasingly likely (if there’s not a devaluation, there will need to be a further crackdown on currency flows, which will also be unpopular).
Thanks for reading
I’ll cover the polls for Chile’s constitutional referendum next week. I always appreciate people sending me tips about the polls they see. Thanks!