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Mexican Presidential hopeful Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) has maintained his lead over his rivals in a series of electoral tracking poll published Tuesday. The “Electoral Barometer,” a cumulative pre-election tracker, produced by Bloomberg has shown AMLO capturing the support of 42.40 percent of Mexican voters on average giving him a 17.5 percent lead over his nearest rival Ricardo Anaya.
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The study follows the trend of a survey conducted by Mitofsky between March 16-18, which showed AMOL with 29.5 percent support, among a sample of 1,000 registered voters in face-to-face interviews.
The right-wing candidates Jose Antonio Meade and Anaya, from the Institutional Revolution Party (PRI) and the National Action Party (PAN) respectively, are in a fight for second place, far behind Lopez Obrador.
The analysis gives Meade only 22.80 percent of the voting intention, behind the 24.70 he achieved last time. Meanwhile, Anaya advanced from 23.70 to 24.90, taking a symbolic advantage over its technocrat counterpart.
Bloomberg based its “Electoral Barometer” on different polling firm's outcomes, rating them by “quality” of their processes and how accurate their results have been in past electoral results.
According to Bloomberg: "The Mexico Bloomberg Poll Tracker is based on a ranking system of pollsters that measures their level of quality. Higher weightings are awarded for the following: accuracy of a pollster’s past surveys from the 2006 and 2012 presidential campaigns, how recently the poll was taken, size and margin of error of the poll. Also, surveys conducted in person get higher ratings than those by telephone."
"Polls are also given more weight if they’re conducted by companies that have published surveys during past presidential campaigns and are recognized for having done so by Mexico’s electoral regulator, the INE. Newer pollsters are given a lesser weighting because the system doesn’t have enough information to evaluate their performance. Surveys by new pollsters, that had been preliminarily included in the tracker, may be excluded if they don’t send their databases to INE as required by electoral regulation," the publication added.
Anaya and Meade have engaged in a public quarrel accusing each other of corruption during the last month, which has cost them both credibility while Lopez Obrador has refused to get involved in these disputes.
In his newest campaign spots, Meade talks about fighting corruption and doing honest politics without “laundering money” in an apparent reference to accusations made towards Anaya, who was attacked by both PRI and dissident factions of his party.
He also brags about speaking English, something that Lopez Obrador is not able to do, and enjoying reading a lot, somehow trying to distance himself from current president Enrique Peña Nieto, who was ridiculized during his campaign for not being able to mention “three books that marked his life” during a press conference in Mexico's most important book fair.
Anaya, however, has changed his strategy. In a recent campaign spot, he says he knows the PRI is out of the government and the presidential race - even though their parties are on a virtual tie far behind on the second place - and asks the audience about what kind of change they want for Mexico, saying that AMLO's ideas are outdated while his plans will bring Mexico into the future.
Lopez Obrador, a three-time candidate, has used his campaign to ask people to vote for his “Together We'll Make History” coalition's legislative candidates so the Congress can “really be free,” from corrupt senators and representatives that ask for bribes.
In another spot, Lopez Obrador retakes his old claim about the government luxuries and the private presidential plane, which he says “not even Donald Trump” has and jokes about offering it on sale to the United States president.
The campaign period starts on Friday 30 March 2018, after an in-between period in which candidates had to restrict their comments and publicity. When the campaign period starts, political parties, their coalitions and independent candidates will use broadcast time on radio and T.V., street banners and all they have at hand to ask citizens to vote for them.
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