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Chris Covert
Rantburg.com
With less than seven weeks to go until the July 1st elections, Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) presidential candidate Enrique Pena Nieto continues to maintain a commanding lead over his nearest rival Partido Accion Nacional (PAN) presidential candidate Josefina Vazquez Mota by 20 percentage points, the same lead he has had since the start of the campaign March 30th, according to data supplied by an ISA-GEA poll published in Milenio news daily.
The political week started with a debate, and a national as well as international press distracted by the cleavage of a Mexican model for all of 15 seconds at the start of the debate. The week continued with barbs against Pena Nieto, especially with reference to his past associations with former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and PRI's response to those attacks.
Last week, just after a week of several unsettling press gaffes and strong, if disturbing indications of a campaign that is imploding, Vazquez Mota told reporters that internal polling placed her candidacy within ten percentage points of Pena Nieto. Her claim has some justification, since the polling done by PAN in the Michoacan elections was a more accurate reflection of how close that race was than news polls had indicated at the time.
Despite that seeming good news, leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador briefly overtook Vazquez Mota earlier in the week by less than two percentage points, only to slide back to third place. Despite that setback, Lopez Obrador continued to protest to his supporters that he would win, and by a comfortable margin.
When undecided voters are excluded by the polling, Pena Nieto continues to maintain a comfortable lead of slightly less than 15 percent, which he has held since the start. Still, Mexican undecided voters are the second largest block, as this writer has pointed out before, a possibly worrying trend for the frontrunner, albeit all the current undecided voters are unlikely to break for any one of the candidates.
In the two weeks before the next presidential debate it will be interesting to see if Pena Nieto and the PRI can maintain this lead all the way into the elections. So far he has been not only the candidate to beat but also has been comfortable enough in his lead to revert to the old PRI tactic of co-optation, in which the goal is to poach support from political rivals.