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By Chris Covert
Rantburg.com
With less than seven weeks remaining in the campaign for Mexican president of the republic, the race amongst the three top candidate has slightly tightened, according to data supplied by the Milenio news daily.
Not counting undecided voters, Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) presidential candidate Enrique Pena Nieto still maintains a commanding lead over his nearest rival Partido Accion Nacional (PAN) presidential candidate Josefina Vazquez Mota with 46.9 percent of voters against 27 percent for Vazquez Mota.
Leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador also raised his position, tightening the margin between himself and Vazquez Mota with 24.3 percent.
When taking into account undecided voters, Vazquez Mota is less than 15 percentage points away from Pena Nieto with 35.8 percent to 20.7 percent. Lopez Obrador trails slightly at 18.5 percent.
Frontrunner Pena Nieto has to be worried at this point. The second largest block of voters are still undecided voters with 23.6 percent, slightly smaller than a week ago, but still indicative that voters may not make their final decision until they are queued up to vote July 1st.
Even so, Vazquez Mota protested last week that PAN polls show her within ten percentage points of Pena Nieto. Recent history has shown that PAN polling is more accurate than public polls, the most relevant example being the Michoacan gubernatorial race last November where PRI's margin of victory was much thinner than predicted.
The tightening of the race between Pena Nieto and Vazquez Mota may well be the result of a lessening of enthusiasm for the PRI candidate and the combined efforts of PAN's star line up, which includes PAN president Gustavo Madero and former finance minister Ernesto Cordero. Both were featured in different campaign events last week, trying to draw distinctions between the two parties and laying out the case for a third term for PAN politicians.
The case for management of the Mexican economy with a PAN leader at the helm is compelling, given that PRI governors, including Pena Nieto have demonstrated a dreadfully poor sense of public resource stewardship, especially in the light of the recent Coahuila debt scandal. That scandal has resulted in several convictions and several former Coahuila state employees becoming fugitives from justice.
Oddly, the one politician not included among those regarded as complicit in the scandal was former Coauila governor and PRI president Humberto Moreira Valdes, who is currently in Texas, it is said, working to get a master's degree.
As this writer has quipped in the past, a master's in public finance for Moreira can be ruled out.
Chris Covert writes Mexican Drug War and national political news for Rantburg.com