Politics and Polls - 4 November 2020
State level polls in Mexico and a new presidential poll in Peru
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.
Three items today:
Mexico - AMLO’s allies doing poorly at the state level
Peru - Forsyth continues to lead a very crowded field
US - Polling miss; Biden favored to win the hard way with the count still ongoing
Mexico - AMLO’s allies doing poorly at the state level
Above: Ranking of top five governors from El Heraldo. The article contains a graphic with the rest of the rankings.
El Heraldo and Caudae published a poll with the approval ratings for all of the governors in Mexico.
Only eight governors have over 50% approval. Seven of them come from parties in opposition to President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico City, an ally of AMLO, has 59% approval. The other five governors for Morena are all under 40% approval.
While AMLO continues to poll well for the mid-terms next year, this is one piece of data suggesting potential problems for the president.
However, all is not great for AMLO’s opponents. Javier Corral of the PAN, one of the few governors with a national profile, only has 27% approval in the state of Chihuahua.
Peru - Forsyth continues to lead a very crowded field
A poll from Instituto de Estudios Peruanos (IEP) shows George Forsyth as the only candidate with double digit support in Peru’s election early next year. Given the large number of potential candidates (some of whom are still undecided about whether they will run), the race for second place is a mess. The current top four candidates are:
George Forsyth - 23%
Veronika Mendoza -9%
Keiko Fujimori - 8%
Daniel Urresti - 7.3%
Peru (and Ecuador) have a divided field with a large number of undecided voters, meaning that the odds that some relatively unknown candidate finds traction in the coming months are high. While Forsyth is the odds on favorite to make a potential second round, who he might face is completely up in the air.
US - Polling miss; Biden favored to win the hard way with the count still ongoing
I put this at the bottom in case you don’t want to read anything about the US.
The US has a difficult and disputed vote count and recount ahead. Biden is favored to win once all the votes are counted, but five states are currently too close to call. Biden will win a majority of the national popular vote with a larger margin of victory than Clinton had once all the absentee votes are counted.
Even if Biden wins the election as expected, the polling industry in the US will face a large reckoning. The polling miss in 2016 was relatively small nationally and explainable at the state levels where it went wrong. The polling miss this year by some of the top rated pollsters is far larger and I think it will look even worse once they start digging into local results and dividing up the vote by different demographics. Based on the early numbers, they got lucky that they didn’t miss by more.
Yesterday, I wrote that Latin America is likely to take some polling innovations from the US election. There are some new polling methods that proved quite accurate and others with big misses (and a third group who threw darts at a wall and got lucky). Some of the online methods run by private firms that don’t publish their data in the media reportedly did quite well. I think the lessons learned coming out of this election in the US including the mistakes made by some polling firms will accelerate the trend towards polling models other than live-caller. That will have ramifications for how polls are conducted in Latin America moving forward.
Thanks for reading
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