Today, at the heart of the race for the Presidency are the polls. Tools for researching electorates, for designing strategies, messages, and measuring the results of their work, are also used to promote their narratives in the public arena in order to stimulate, induce or inhibit voters, in addition to obtaining resources under the table. Campaign surveys are hired by the teams of those who aspire to office, individual politicians, businessmen to see where to put their money and the media because it gains them impact and audiences, significance, influence and, finally, power.
The surveys have two levels. One is that which is carried out for strategic purposes and is kept confidential, essential for decision-making. The other is when it is contracted for public dissemination purposes. In the first case, the surveys are chemically pure, in the sense of the application of the methodologies of the demoscopic houses. In the second, purity may have its consequences. For example, which is a real Mexican case, when to define a candidacy the party gave the sample to those who would do the exercise on where it wanted them to survey, manipulating a priori the measurement result.
This perversion is part of the phenomenon of destruction of the instrument that we have seen in recent years, given the insane decision of the parties to play with the measurements in public opinion. In one of the last elections for a governorship, the party that won hired all the surveys it could – accredited, discredited and occasion – to construct the idea that the victory of its candidacy was irreversible and, in this way, inhibit the vote. . What they did was make advertising agreements with the media and, instead of open propaganda or disguised as newsletters, they asked them to publish the polls in which their candidacy was sweeping. Discouraging voting while that party groomed its clientele to get them to vote is a simple and effective, although expensive, way to win an election.
The manipulation of the surveys by the parties, who own the demographic studies as clients and with the right to decide whether to publish them or not, has disrupted the industry and has taken away everyone’s credibility, although some of them really they do not have it or are unknown in the market. In the current presidential race, the polling houses, all put in a single bag without distinguishing experience, methodologies or even together with supposed companies that no one knows, are being measured in their quality and integrity based on the results that their measurements are producing each time. month. The data is crazy.
There are companies that survey only through digital platforms with robots, that score a tie (Massive Caller) or have differences of up to 37 points (MetricsMX) in favor of the candidate with whom they are close, or that work for members of the war room . There are surveys that give an advantage of 57 points (Gii360) to the official candidate, Claudia Sheinbaum, over the opposition candidate, Xóchitl Gálvez, who do not distinguish from the rest despite the fact that the company does what is known as push-pollspseudo-surveys that, through false information, induce questions to obtain the answers they want.
In the middle of them are the survey houses with years of experience, although even within these there are also notable differences. For example, taking its last measurement, published in April, the difference in favor of Sheinbaum was 20 points between the renowned De las Heras Demotecnia (37%) and GEA-ISA (17%).
The surveys published by the newspapers, which according to Roy Campos, from Mitofsky, are the most credible due to the prestige they pledge in each exercise, also have relevant differences, such as those of EL FINANCIERO, which gave Sheinbaum an advantage of 17 points, against that of Reformwho gave it 24, outside the margin of error, but in coincidence with Buendía&Márquez and The universal (23%). Mitofsky, in The Economistwith 28.2%, and Covarrubias, in The Heraldwith 29.1%, moved more than 10 points away from EL FINANCIERO.
To better understand the percentages, we should take into account how much each percentage point is equivalent to in the surveys. Jorge Buendía, from Buendía&Márquez, says that if the nominal list is 99 million, each point represents 990 thousand votes, because its target audience is people with voter ID cards. If 65% of the nominal list voted in the next presidential election, each percentage point would be equivalent to 643,500 votes.
If we take as a reference the vote in 2018, when 63.42% of the nominal list voted, the difference in votes in the case of companies that use robots is 37 million, which would mean, taking rhetorical license, 7 million more than Andrés Manuel López Obrador obtained. But even in those of EL FINANCIERO and ReformTaking 2018 as a reference, there are four and a half million votes difference, and between eight and 10 million more if we incorporate the rest of the measurements published in the newspapers.
In this frenzy of surveys with such varied, contrasting and even antagonistic results, each party has used the one that best suits them to support their candidacy, adding ingredients to the confusion and turning the contest into a horse race, where those who are sure to win. losing are the pollsters. Some because the results were far from what they were recording; others because they got the wrong winner (as if the exercise were forecasting); some more because the candidates will claim that they were given wrong information, and many because the photographs they took during the campaign were far from the expectations of the collective imagination.
But there is a good point within all the bad, very cynical but real. Whatever happens, no one will pay for their errors, abuses and mistakes, as has happened until today.
