Spanish elections and politics II: Catalan elections on February 14, 2021

[parochial boy]

Apparently El Periódico de Cataluña published a poll about whether the Catalan issue should be solved with talks or with another round of article 155 (direct rule).

This wouldn't be noteworthy if it wasn't because they took crosstabs for several regions of Spain. The results are here:



Quite surprising to say the least. First of all, I'm surprised talks aren't just winning, but that they are winning handily. Brute force was a lot more popular a couple months ago.

Either way looking at the crosstabs obviously the Basques and Catalans are almost unanimously opposed. Galicia is also quite opposed.

Beyond that there aren't many significant differences elsewhere.

I think the comparison of Andalusia and the Castillas is quite interesting, would have expected it to be the other way round based on traditional partisan support - I suppose the fact that it isn't is quite telling.

[parochial boy]

didn't realise I was such a law and order hawk

[parochial boy]

Why the Vox strength in the Comunitat Valencia? The Catalan link?

[parochial boy]

Not sure if I'm the only one who's asked this, but... is there something resembling a possibility that shy Vox voters actually make it the largest party on the Right?

it would require some pretty serious sampling errors to have been made by pretty much all of the posters. Far more than any sort of "shy" effect could seriously justify.

[parochial boy]

Where is PACMA's best shot of winning a seat? Madrid presumably?

Also, everyone assuming that VOX will surge by 3 points over all the polling... remember that everyone expected the same thing in France, and Sweden, and in both cases neither happens. VOX having virtually no electoral history or "last time voters" makes them harder to poll, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the polls are massively underestimating them.

[parochial boy]

Where is PACMA's best shot of winning a seat? Madrid presumably?

Also, everyone assuming that VOX will surge by 3 points over all the polling... remember that everyone expected the same thing in France, and Sweden, and in both cases neither happens. VOX having virtually no electoral history or "last time voters" makes them harder to poll, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the polls are massively underestimating them.

The issue about Populist parties like VOX, RN, Lega, AFD and SD is that they do not have any sort of loyal voter base, like PP and PSOE. Like Podemos and Cs they came out of nowhere, and could disappear just as quickly, as their voters find another party to channel their hatred/disgust of the establishment, corruption, immigrants, catalans... I think they could depending on the circumstances either do way better than polls expect (like Brexit, Finns, AFD, Salvini) or way worse like (FN and SD). I suspect the former, but both is equally possible. 

Well, RN in particular do have a well established electorate, which is why the pollsters tend to get them right (going off topic a bit - in the first round at least, in the second round the pollsters were wrong because it meant trying to understand how many non-FN voters would choose Le Pen, which was a situation that hadn't really happened before and was therefore harder to poll...).

With pollsters getting RWPP scores wrong, it is usually down to them simply asking the wrong people/sampling wrong/estimating "likelyhood to vote" etc.. wrong, rather than a "shy voter" effect - which imo, is an effect that people tend to massively overestimate. In particular, your "normal" RWPP voter tends to be someone who is harder to reach through conventional phone or internet poll (older, less educated, lower income, potentially less politically motivated and therefore less likely to answer the phone or sign up to an online panel). However, with VOX, iirc, one of the things that came out of Andalusia is that their electorate tends to be a little bit different to the clichéd "left behind working class" RWPP voter (which is, of course, nowhere near as accurate as is commonly presented). Someone correct me if I am wrong, but I think they were often demographically closer to the traditional right-wing/PP voter than, say, Le Pen voters in the rural east of France, which has always been volatile.

Anyway, what I'm saying is, yeah, there is a very good chance they are being polled incorrectly - but it could go in either direction - and it probably isn't correct to call it a "shy voter" effect.

[parochial boy]

From a more detailed report, it looks like the right and the left are both turning out, just in different parts of the country.

Here's for example El Ejido, the one municipality where Vox won in the Andalusian regional election:

2016: 34.5%
2019: 40.7%

Compare that to Andalucia at large:

2016: 37.6%
2019: 38.9%

So in Andalucia we might see the same phenomenon as in the regional election where it is the right that flocks to the polls.

In Catalonia meanwhile while turnout is up everywhere, secessionist rural areas (like Vic) are up more than unionist areas (like L'Hospitalet)

Just what we needed, more uncertainty

It's not hugely helpful in this context to look at autonomias anyway. When you look at turnout in a more granular or especially municipal level the picture is pretty interesting. PP hub Lugo and Vox base town of Almeria have only small turnout bumps. While leftist Alcocorn in Madrid has a more significant bump. It's also hard to predict what Catalonia will do, and a massive turnout in Barcelona could augur a major result for Podemos or the separatist parties.

But as a general rule the turnout is mostly up 3-5 points across the board without really favoring either the right or left.

Was gonna say something like this, and it's also probably worth remarking that those areas in Aragon and Castilla y Leon that look like they are having big increases in turnout are also pretty sparsely inhabited. With the exception of Zaragoza, it will take pretty big swings in the likes of Teruel to move any seats at all.

Honestly, I wouldn't read anything into the reports at all. We always overreact to turnout reports, and get it wrong more often than right tbh.

[parochial boy]

How long till the results start to come through? I'm not sure if I can bear another late night watching early hope turn into crushing despair...

[parochial boy]

How long till the results start to come through? I'm not sure if I can bear another late night watching early hope turn into crushing despair...

In the next minutes, i think results will start coming in. By 22:00h, the overall image will be clear.

I think they said they won't release data until the Canaries are done voting.

So hopefully we get a proper dump then, rather than freaking out about 6 tiny random municipalities in Castilla where VOX have done really well

[parochial boy]

Excluding the Catalan separatist parties, wouldn't the smaller regionalist ones be more likely to support the left leaning bloc than right leaning?  Looks like it will be a mess and possibly another election later this year although I think smaller parties would be more likely to support left than right.  Right pretty much has to hit 176 or get very close to realistically govern.  And if they do hit that, do they have Popular Party or Citizens lead the way.  I would think Citizens would have a better chance of working with smaller parties than Popular Party.

Likewise if PSOE + Citizens have majority is there any chance Citizens will reverse their cordon sanitaire as there will probably a lot of pressure including from the EU for the two to work together since both are the most pro-EU.

The only proper regionalist parties that will apparently make it will be CC and UPN

UPN contested the election alongside PP and Cs as Navarra Suma so I doubt it.

CC hates Podemos so it's also very unlikely, though slightly less likely. CC is a Marxist party in the Groucho sense: "these are our principles, if you don't like them, we have others"; and they did abstain on Sánchez's confidence vote.

However I would not count on them

Well, Compromis would suppport PSOE/Podemos of course but they only have one seat in this poll. And PNV (Basque nationalists) supported the PSOE government as well

Regional breakdowns of a national poll though. Not likely to be very accurate at that level.

[parochial boy]

4.2% in:

28.4% PSOE
19.0% PP
10.8% C's
11.5% UP
  7.9% Vox

What part of the country are these from?  It seems PSOE and PP getting about what polls suggested, but other three especially Vox way under.  Off course depending on what part of the country these are from may not be representative at all.

All over, but Basques, Aragon, Castilla y Leon and Asturias have counted th most

[parochial boy]

PP-Cs-Vox seem to lose seats compared to PP-Cs in 2016 in almost all regions. It's going to be PSOE-UP with support from regionalists.

PP forgot that most votes are to be won in the center, not on the fringes

Exactly, and so did C's.

It's probably too soon but

Europe should be more like Spain imo

Saving this for the day PP-Cs-Vox is formed

[parochial boy]

PSOE, Podemos, PNV currently on 176. That would mean no need for any of the independentists...

[parochial boy]

PSOE, Podemos, PNV currently on 176. That would mean no need for any of the independentists...

remember PNV is getting overpolled right now.

They'll stay on 6 - seats by constituency remember.

even with Madrid being underpolled, if the current breakdown in Madrid stays roughly the same, it won't make much difference to the seat totals

PSOE, Podemos, PNV currently on 176. That would mean no need for any of the independentists...

Plus Compromis' seat.

And the Cantabrian regionalists on one. Not a lot of room for maneouvre though

[parochial boy]

The big catch from the Gad3 seat projection has to be Galicia. Left block has more seats there then Right.

Not that surprising. From my analysis I did a while back, the left and the right have been roughly tied in Galicia since the early 00s.

However, it didn't appear that way because PP was united (and still is for the most part) while the left was split between BNG and PSOE.

It's not even the first time it happens; in 2004 the left and the right tied in Galicia and in 2008 the left won by 1 seat (11 for PP; 10 for PSOE and 2 for BNG)

Actually, I'm a bit curious about this. Is there any particular reason as to why Galicia has been trending left?

[parochial boy]

With 92.27% of the vote counted it is

PSOE   28.79%
PP       16.69%
C        15.79%
UP       14.31%
VOX     10.24%

Two blocs pretty much identical which is a disaster for the Right.

Worth noting that the left has almost always won. Spain has always been a left of center country.

This is the first time the right wins 2 elections back to back in the popular vote, and only the fourth time ever after 2000, 2011 and 2016.

If I've done my maths right, if you add in the 2% that PACMA, Compromis and the Cantabrians got, it's still a popular vote win for left wing parties though. Even more so if you include the nationalists

[parochial boy]

Vox's best provinces, ie over 13% - were the two African cities, Castilla la Mancha (but not Leon, which is a bit surprising), Murcia, Andalusia and Madrid. Not too many other European Right Wing Populists do that well in the capital city...

I'm actually a little bit surprised by Extremadura though. Going by the "dying rural town" narrative, it is almost the first place I would think of, but Vox were really average there (proving that reality is often more complicated than "the narrative" I guess).

Also, I'm going to claim my Kudos for being just about the only person to suggest that Vox weren't necesarilly going to outperform the polls

[parochial boy]

Cs national leadership reacted with visible displeasure to the Valls offer; party spokepersons stated they don't support 'populists' like Ada Colau.

That's... ironic...

[parochial boy]

Someone is confusing minority and coalition I think.

And the current situation in the UK should provide a pretty good demonstration into the problems that FPTP can lead to. To say the least

[parochial boy]

I'm not sure that income is no longer a factor in the UK, although I suspect patterns in Canada are quite different. Age is a major factor in Spain. PP is by far the largest party in the age group above 60, while it's only the fourth party in the age group between 18 and 24. Podemos is the preferred party or performs strongly among those voters below 35, Cs is stronger in the 35-44 group and PSOE in the 45-54. Regarding the level of education. it's often correlated to income

I know they're probably here somewhere; but have you got breakdowns by party by age somewhere?

Curious to see how PSOE and Vox did by age group.

[parochial boy]

I know the crosstabs will be tiny. But that's a hell of an age gap between PNV and Bildu - not even sure you can put it down to the ETA ceasefire as they were still active until quite recently

[parochial boy]

What I particularly like about the Catalan issue is how utterly unsympathetic both the Catalan and Spanish nationalists come across as. Turning this into a protracted constitutional crisis in what, lets be honest, is a country that has already had an unfairly rough time really deserves nothing but scorn.

[parochial boy]

75 No: VOX, ERC, JxCAT, CUP

That alliance needs to continue

[parochial boy]

Could you make an actual contribution please, instead of just obsessively posting tweets about podemos?