Final poll of polls

On Sunday, July 1, 2012 Mexican voters will go to the polls and elect a new president. In Mexico whichever candidate wins a simple plurality of the national vote is elected. Before the election of Vicente Fox of the PAN in 2000 Mexico had been ruled by a single party (the PRI) for over 70 years.

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Elect-o-meter

Check out the interactive poll of polls I made.

P.S. There is a poll ban starting tomorrow so I'll restrict access to the interactive chart to people outside Mexico.

Campaign Effects

In Mexico presidential campaigns last 90 days. This year campaigning started on March 30, before this date all campaigning was prohibited. Judging by the way Josefina Vázquez Mota's support fell after she started campaigning voters either didn't like what they saw in her ideology and issue stance or she is a very bad campaigner.

Debate Effects

Gabriel Quadri, the candidate for the Mexican presidency of a small party practically owned by the teachers' union must be a good debater. Since his debate performance he has managed to consistently poll over the 2% required for his party to keep its registration. One small problem with this analysis is that sometimes polling firms report voter preferences as rounded numbers, and for candidates polling in the 0-4% range this introduces some artifacts.

Poll of polls - June 20

Time for another update of my poll of polls. With less than two weeks remaining until voting day the race is on! I mean the race for second place because Enrique Peña Nieto of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional has pretty much cinched the presidency for the next six years.

I've now switched to a Bayesian method of pooling the polls. I'm using a Kalman Filter that corrects for House Effects (the bias of each polling firm) as described in Pooling the Polls Over an Election Campaign (pdf), by Simon Jackman. I'm using diffuse priors for the house effects but I could probably switch to using the posteriors for each polling firm from the 2006 election, if I ever get around to modeling it.

The thing that worries the most is that polling firms tend to be highly variable, for example, in 2006 the most accurate pollsters were Reforma and GEA-ISA, but in the last elections they did not perform so well. Oh well, we'll see what happens.

To recap from previous blogs

• My data comes from the poll of polls by ADN Político.
• I added a couple of polls conducted by Indemerc and corrected some missing polls from El Universal - Buendía y Laredo
• I'm using weekly averages of the GEA-ISA daily tracking poll because it has some weird periodical artifacts

References

Pooling the Polls Over an Election Campaign, Australian Journal of Political Science, 2005 V40(4):499-517

Poll of polls - June 11

I now use the weekly average of the GEA-ISA daily tracking poll and I've added the Indemerc pollinf firm and some polls from Buendía y Laredo that were missing from ADN Político's poll of polls. None of the polls were conducted after the presidential debate. A chart including those who did not answer is provided after the jump

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Violence in Monterrey after Cadereyta

After 49 bodies were dumped on a highway leading from Monterrey to Reynosa you would have expected May to have been a particularly violent month in the Monterrey metro area.  Instead it was one of the least violent months of 2012. Still, violence is an order of magnitude above what is was before the Zetas broke from the Gulf Cartel.

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Poll of polls - June 4

With the presidential election less than a month away and Noel Maurer baiting me into analyzing it, now is good time to start tracking vote intentions. But we have to keep in mind that since the 2006 election was won by .58 percentage points and before 2000 Mexico was ruled for 70 years by the PRI we really don't have much data to go on. And most importantly, I don't follow politics closely, if it wasn't for a couple of big revelations shown during the debate I would have no idea there is a guy called Quadri running for president.

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The capture of 'El Mochomo' and homicides in Jalisco

In an article published last year, security spokesman Alejandro Poiré and María Teresa Martínez argued that the Mexican government's strategy of targeting high level drug lords did not increase violence. The authors analyzed the specific case of the killing of Nacho Coronel and concluded that the increase in violence in the states of Jalisco, Nayarit, and Colima did not start with the killing of Nacho Coronel, but rather preceded it and coincided with the kidnapping of his son, which started an inter-cartel war between his organization and the Beltrán Leyvas.

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