Uruguay - Election Notes - October 2024

Take a moment to obsess over the Uruguay election polls before you go back to obsessing over the US election polls.

Four comments to update my previous commentary on Uruguay's election. Also, go read Saldias's article on the election for other insights.

We can't totally discount the outlier possibility that the FA wins in the first round. Yamandú Orsi of the Frente Amplio is polling around 43% of the vote. That sounds about right. Once the undecided voters come home, he should win about 45%. Getting to over 50% of the vote would require a huge polling miss and would go against other recent Uruguayan election trends. But the odds aren't zero. The odds of a first round win are perhaps 5% or 10% likely. It's an outlier scenario but one that should be taken seriously.

The race for second place is uncertain. The Colorado Party's Andrés Ojeda is making a solid effort to defeat Álvaro Delgado, the candidate for the National Party backed by President Lacalle Pou. Whoever wins second place will face Orsi in the second round. Delgado's numbers have been falling and Ojeda's have been rising for the past month. The late surge by Ojeda is a type of momentum that is hard to capture in the polls before the final week before the election. Ojeda is not a populist insurgent outsider candidate, but he is bringing just enough anti-establishment credibility to make the campaign interesting and appeal to younger voters who would like to see change without voting for the FA. Delgado is still the favorite to take second place, and he's probably the stronger of the two candidates in a hypothetical second round.

Ojeda and Delgado would likely be gracious losers and quickly endorse the other. I do not think this close campaign is going to lead to a divide in the second round.

The pension counter-reform plebiscite remains near a coin flip. I wrote in the previous newsletter that it was about 60% likely to pass and those odds remain. Late polling shows that support for the referendum has declined somewhat as expected. Still, in the final rounds of polling, "Yes" barely tops "No" in most surveys with enough undecideds to mean that this is well within the margin of error. So while I think Yes has a small edge, I would not be surprised if this went either way. It will be a close vote.

How those three points above play off each other complicates everything.

• One reason that an Orsi first round victory remains unlikely is that some voters are going to strategically jump to the competitive second place race.

• I don't have good polling on this, but I would guess the rise of Ojeda and the continued strength of the pension counter-reform are linked. It's an anti-establishment vote unconnected with the FA party machine.

• If the pension referendum passes, it likely means the FA does quite well in the Congressional elections. Yet, as I wrote last month, it also likely helps the incumbent party in the second round retake the presidency because Uruguayan voters will look for balance after the market shock.

Does anything above suggest it is time to panic? No. It’s Uruguay. It will be fine.