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By Chris Covert
Rantburg.com
A new poll by the Mexican Reforma news daily puts the gap between Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) frontrunner Enrique Pena Nieto in a virtual dead heat versus the Mexican left's candidate Andres Manual Lopz Orbador, according to data supplied by Animal Politico website.
Nearly every other poll in the republic has Pena Nieto between 15 and 20 percentage points above his rivals, including Partido Accion Nacional (PAN) candidate Josefina Vazquez Mota, depending on how the undecided voters are thinking. The huge gap has remained virtually unchanged since the very first week of the campaign in the beginning of April.
According to the Reforma data, Pena Nieto claims 38 percent versus 34 percent enjoyed by Lopez Obrador, while PAN's Vazquez Mota has slipped to third place with 23 percent.
The most recent polling data, supplied by Milenio news daily, has Pena Nieto at an even more commanding 21 percentage points above Vazquez Mota with Lopez Obrador in a very close third place.
Since the start of the campaign, Vazquez Mota has consistently trailed Pena Nieto by between 15 and 20 points, trading for second place with Lopez Obrador several times.
Vazquez Mota herself claimed a few weeks back that her internal polling had her campaign within 10 percentage points of Pena Nieto, however none of the other polling organizations has released data that would confirm any kind of movement undermining Pena Nieto's commanding lead.
Vazquez Mota's campaign has suffered mightily since the very start with several very public gaffes and missteps, tempered by a generally good performance in the first Mexican presidential debates earlier this month.
Despite that, none of the candidates, not even Pena Nieto, has shown any kind of bounce in the polls since the debate.
If Reforma's numbers are accurate, two events can be credited to moving the polls numbers away from Pena Nieto.
The first was the US Federal investigation of former Tamaulipas state governor Tomas Yarrington for links to Mexican organized crime. Yarrington is facing federal forfeiture proceedings for real properties in south Texas allegedly purchased with drug money. That event impelled PRI president Pedro Coldwell to suspend Yarrington's membership in the PRI, a move generally ridiculed by PRI opponents as window dressing.
As one Mexican writer put it: "This is actually so funny to me, getting kicked out of PRI for corruption..."
The second event, less than two weeks ago, was the arrest of two Mexican Army commanders, General Tomas Angeles Dauahare and General Brigadier Roberto Dawe Gonzalez, the first of whom was on a slate of at-large candidates for the national Chamber of Deputies. That detention probably proved the most embarrassing for Pena Nieto and PRI, made clear by their cancellation of a campaign in Chiapas state to huddle to make plans.
The large winning percentages displayed by PRI are not the first time Mexican preference polls have fallen short of the data.
The Michoacan gubernatorial election last November showed the PRI candidate ahead, and claims were being made at the time and echoed by Mexican and international press, that a 60,000 vote margin in the three way race would be considered a huge win for the PRI in a state dominated by the Partido Revolucion Democratica (PRD).
PRI won by less than 42,000 votes and failed to get a governing majority in the state chamber of deputies. Just a week before the elections, PAN president Gustavo Madero Munoz had made claims his internal polling showed the race much closer than polls were running. In fact, PAN came within a cat's hair of overturning the gubernatorial election because of PRI antics during the campaign period.
The Michoacan elections were one of many factors in then-PRI president Humberto Moreira's decision to resign his position the following month.
One problem for PRI that has plagued the thus far wildly successful campaign of Pena Nieto has been the rather large number of undecided voters, as many as 29 percent at one point. That block of potential voters is an apparent indication that the Mexican public has yet to close the deal on Pena Nieto. As unlikely as it may be that all undecided voters break for one candidate, undecided voters overshadowed the PRI campaign. PRI members have to be worried about the potential of all decided voters breaking for everyone but Pena Nieto.
Chris Covert writes Mexican Drug War and national political news for Rantburg.com
© Copyright 2012 by Chris Covert
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