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It’s been rare over the past 10 years for Colombia’s Invamer poll to show a president with a higher approval than disapproval rating. One such moment, the first months of Gustavo Petro’s presidency, has ended for now.
Colombia’s Blu Radio has the entire 112-page PDF of the poll’s results, with long time series. Also interesting:
Colombia’s National Police remain underwater.
The Prosecutor-General’s office continues to enjoy little trust under Francisco Barbosa’s leadership.
Support for granting TPS to Venezuelan refugees remains low, but is higher than ever.
A 19-point margin of support for the ELN peace talks—but it was a 41-point margin in August.
Here’s the Economist’stracker of polls leading up to Brazil’s October 2 first-round presidential elections, with the actual result of those elections added as horizontal lines.
Polling predicted challenger Luis Inácio Lula da Silva’s vote with reasonable accuracy. His 48.4 percent vote share—not enough to avoid a runoff election on October 30—was well within the band of probability that polls foresaw.
Polling utterly failed, however, to predict controversial President Jair Bolsonaro’s share of the vote. A consensus of surveys had pointed to October 2 being a blowout. Instead, Bolsonaro ended up just 5.2 percentage points behind Lula, with an outside chance of winning re-election in the second round.
Bolsonaro’s result was better than what he got in any of the dozens of polls that the Economist tracked (the blue dots in the chart). Only a handful came close.
Brazilian and international press will no doubt publish analyses over the next few days trying to explain how polling missed so bad, and what this means for the future of the opinion-surveying industry.
In the United States, where Donald Trump has outperformed his poll numbers by a few percentage points, analysts talk about “shy Trump voters.” That may have happened in Brazil, too: a lot of respondents who supported the far-right, often boorish populist president appear to have declined to say so in interviews with pollsters.
It’s also possible that pollsters under-sampled a pro-Bolsonaro sector of the population—although with compulsory voting (and nearly 80 percent turnout), the electorate’s makeup should have been easier to predict than in the United States.
It’s illegal in Colombia to publish new poll data less than 7 days before an election. The final round of the country’s presidential election is next Sunday, so this is it.
La Silla Vacía maintains a weighted poll of polls, sort of 538 style. It shows Gustavo Petro and Rodolfo Hernandez within 0.7 points of each other. And we’re not going to see any more polling after this.
With this close of a vote, and this much uncertainty, the looming question for the evening of the 19th and the days immediately afterward is: will the loser and his base of supporters concede? Or will the second half of June be a scary time of anger, fear, and disorder in Colombia?
If Petro wins by a razor-slim margin and Rodolfo Hernández rejects it: Hernández has picked up support from some wealthy and far-right elements who don’t have a history of playing by the rules. Though the political bosses, landowners and others who supported paramilitarism 15-20 years ago probably can’t force non-recognition of a Petro victory, they can spend the succeeding weeks and months making much of the country ungovernable and violent if they don’t accept the outcome. There also appears to be white-hot hatred of Petro in some corners of the military, and while I don’t foresee unconstitutional saber-rattling during the days following the election, I can’t dismiss the possibility either.
If Hernández wins by a razor-slim margin and Gustavo Petro rejects it: Petro’s supporters include core participants in last year’s national strike, which paralyzed the country for two months. They can control the streets again. And don’t expect Colombia’s National Police to obey proper use of force standards when they respond: they have little record of doing that in the past.
The second half of June could be really complicated.
All credit here goes to the Chile-based Latinobarómetro polling organization, which carries out an annual public-opinion survey in most of Latin America and the Caribbean. The 2018 poll (PDF) is a fascinating read.
For an upcoming presentation, I wanted to know what the poll said about how Latin Americans are viewing the three government institutions that have the most to do with defense and security: the military, the police, and the justice system. When citizens are asked whether they trust these institutions, the poll shows a huge variation across countries.
Also interesting is the gap, in percentage points, between trust in the armed forces and trust in the police.
Perhaps it makes sense that the police, which are in more regular contact with the population, would be consistently lower. But this is a big problem, because it feeds calls to send the military into the streets to perform crimefighting roles that should be up to civilians.
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