Politics: Presidential race tightens post debate

MEXICO - Report 14 May 2018 by Guillermo Valdes and Esteban Manteca

A series of GEA-ISA polls conducted since early March and following the April 22 presidential candidates’ debate point to a tightening race in which people appear more open to changing their choice of candidate and more convinced that this is shaping up to be a tight race.

Obviously perceptions are somewhat skewed by the tendency of most people who have already settled on a favorite candidate to perceive him or her as the winner, but more than a fifth of voters report the debate left them with a more favorable impression of either Ricardo Anaya or Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and on balance, people tended to view Ricardo Anaya as having the best debate performance of any candidate. And while debates tend not to sway voters to change their candidate preferences, 7% of citizens say they did just that.

This is increasingly looking like a contest between López Obrador and Ricardo Anaya, with José Antonio Meade continuing to struggle to excite PRI supporters and failing to come up with ways to woo the roughly 80% of voters unconvinced that the incumbent party should be given another term.
And things appear to be tightening further when we see that the almost half of the 11% of respondents who say they could yet be swayed to change their first choice of candidate say Anaya would be their second choice, and that in principle 4% of AMLO voters say they might yet abandon him. In fact, the projected outcome flips when we combine Ricardo Anaya’s maximum voter preference scenarios with AMLO’s minimum ones.

It will not be easy for the "For Mexico In Front" coalition to lure the four percent capable of switching from López Obrador and the one-to-two percentage points it could pick up from Margarita Zavala. Anaya proved capable of taking good advantage of the debate, but is unlikely to face such an unprepared AMLO next time. Moreover, with more people thinking the race is shaping up to be a tight one, voter turnout could prove much stronger than if people think AMLO has it sewn up.

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