Argentina Legislative Elections, November 14

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Looks like JxC is making some gains tonight

I'm not sure about the popular vote but the seats are probably going to end with them winning slightly fewer than the PASO. FdT improved slightly in PBA, FIT flipped the 2nd seat in Jujuy and a few other marginal seats are close.

Best guess would be going from 120 to 118

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I was expecting the mysterious box of late arriving overwhelmingly Peronist ballots falling off the back of a truck would happen in La Pampa but instead the award for "most suspicious election" goes to Formosa!

All in all for how unexpected the PASO was this is basically right in line with expectations: Juntos mostly held on and in a few places nearly flipped close seats but with how many marginal seats they had it only took a small recovery in a few provinces for Todos to win some back.

The amount of spending the government had to do for even marginal clawbacks is clearly unsustainable so I wouldn't be surprised if officials start jumping ship soon.

In other news, some of the interesting third party results include:

* In Jujuy FIT not only won a seat but beat out FdT for second. However because of wacky D'Hondt distribution this actually helped the government by taking a seat away from Juntos.

* In Tucuman the daughter of former governor/military dictator (not sure the official title) Antonio Dominigo Bussi won 11%, which is a lot considering how Tucuman was among the closest provinces this election

* In La Rioja UCeDe somehow won almost 10%. Pretty weird that such a feudal province (JxC only won 28%) would have a liberal surge but I won't question it

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Turns out the projection wasn't as set as they thought. Espert apparently set to take a third seat off JxC, bringing the provincial tally to 15-15-3-2 and boosting the liberals to 5 seats nationally.

What I really don't get is how Randazzo doesn't win a seat. If just under 40% gets the two major parties 15 seats each then how is 4.4% not enough for one seat? Is he expected to be underrepresented in the late votes?

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Maybe the electoral commission knows something I don't but I'm pretty sure Randazzo is going to take a seat either from Espert or Todos in the end. Otherwise it looks like things are pretty much set so at least this is an election where we can go to bed early

EDIT: I figured it out. So apparently the 3% threshold is 3% of the total voter roll, which Randazzo, despite nominally having 4.4% of the vote, is still under.

But at the time of writing he's a few hundred votes short so I have a hard time seeing him not getting through and taking Espert's 3rd seat.

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I might have figured out the mystery of the unusually high UCeDe result in La Rioja.

One cause is that they happened to be running Martin Menem, the nephew of the former president, for the provincial legislature. His name gave enough tailwind to get them around 5% in the PASO.

The other is that at the very tail end of the campaign he was literally the only candidate outside of CABA to get Milei's official endorsement or a rally in his support.

https://twitter.com/NYGBertie/status/1458169560670949379

Turnout was surprisingly high for a small city in the interior but the median age looks like it was about 17 so maybe not as many voters as it looks. Still, he was boosted 7% and safely qualified with 12% so this might be the first sign Milei has reach beyond the city. Interestingly this boost didn't hurt Juntos in the slightest (they actually rose slightly from the PASO) so apparently his supporters just wouldn't vote otherwise. Espert is probably pretty annoyed he didn't hold any joint rallies in the conurbano, it might have actually helped save that 5th seat from Randazzo.

On that note, Milei had officially been a deputy for about an hour before all but announcing that he'll run for president in 2023

https://twitter.com/laderechadiario/status/1460059567430242309

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Disputes over the last ballots could determine 4 seats.

La Rioja is the closest. JxC needs just 80 votes to flip the second seat back, which doesn't seem at all unrealistic.

In PBA Randazzo only needs a few hundred votes (in absolute terms, not relative to his margin) so he's extremely likely to take Espert's third seat. But if the last votes are extremely good for Espert and Randazzo crosses then he could take the 15th seat from Todos instead.

In Jujuy the radicals are disputing that around 10k PASO ballots deposited for the general election should be counted. If their argument is accepted then they'd win back the second seat from either the government or FIT

and in Río Negro JxC won 27.1% to FdT's 26.9% so that could flip back too

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Going to do a writeup about the aftermath later but since https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elecciones_legislativas_de_Argentina_de_2021 of all places has the most up to date numbers we can dig into the popular vote. According to Wikipedia, the results are

JxC: 9 832 813 votes, 41.89% (-5%)

FdT: 7 879 511 votes, 33.03% (-32.1%)

Right / Libertarian / Liberal: 1 680 430 votes, 7.22% (+521.5%) (!)

Federal Peronists/Third Way: 1 313 858 votes, 5.65% (-27.9%)

FIT-U: 1 270 540 votes, 5.46%(+66.2%)

Others: 1,288,275, 5.54%

So its fair to say this election was lost rather than won, since Juntos actually won fewer votes than last time but gained ground anyway because the vote for Todos completely collapsed. Over 3 million votes left between elections, and that was after pulling all the stops to regain lost votes from the PASO. They can't even blame vote splitting because the Federal Peronists collapsed almost as hard as they did. They shouldn't have too much problem getting things through the lower house since most of the independents will be open to negotiation and at least a few (eg. SER Santa Cruz's deputy) are probably going to basically sit with the government but if things don't dramatically turn around they're going to get completely wiped out in two years.

Besides that, Wikipedia's categorization of the parties is okay for the two main parties but needs better context for the remainder to figure out the real order.

The "right wing" parties could be broadly broken into three groups: parties officially affiliated with Milei and Espert, parties that want to be officially affiliated with them, and independent right wing parties.

The first group consists of LLA, AL and UCeDe, plus UNITE (their nominal national vehicle before RLM jumped ship and which is already trying to draft Milei for president in 2023), Partido Libertad, Valores y Cambio from Misiones which is notably the only Libertarian Party that was able to meet the onerous requirements to run independently without the support of an older party. In total these parties received 1 125 000 votes for right and just under 5%.

The second includes, most notably, Fuerza Republicana in Tucuman, which has had a sudden reinvention as a liberal/libertarian force, as well as smaller provincial parties parties Vamos in Mendoza and the UPF in Córdoba. So the total number of votes for parties that either are affiliated with the two main liberals or officially want to be would be 1 281 000 for 5.5% of the national popular vote

The largest "independent" right wing force was Hotton's Valores+, which is kind of debatable because to my understanding she endorsed Milei but not Espert so you could arguably include her in either of the prior groups but I thought not. The next largest is Córdoba's Encuentro Vecinal Córdoba, and including various smaller right wing parties the total vote for the "independent" right was just under 400 000 (just under 2% nationally) bringing the total right wing vote to 1 680 000 for 7.2% of the vote

The Left's numbers, meanwhile, only include those that are officially a part of FIT-U, so that can be considered their core vote. Including independent splitters, most notably Zamora's AyC would add about 100 000 more votes to increase it to ~1 370 000 (5.9%), and if we're really generous and toss in "fellow travelers" outside of the two official coalitions then adding in FAP and PS would boost the "broad left" vote by 260 000 votes to 1 630 000 (7%)

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And speaking of, the liberal lists of Avanza Libertad and La Libertad Avanza got 4 seats, but it's unclear wheter they'll form a single bloc or separate ones. Espert says they're discussing it but Milei says they aren't and he doesn't seem too keen on it.
This just a feeling i have, and I won't make any predictions, but it wouldn't surprise me, given the very strong personalities of their members (especially of Milei), if by 2023 all four have gone their separate ways. It kinda reminds me of the "Somos vida" list that got five seats in the provincial legislature of Santa Fe in 2019, a personality driven, anti-abortion alliance that quickly disolved due to internal dissagrements (two of those legislators are now with JxC).

They're thinking of splitting apart due to differences in strategy.

Espert has the straightforward goal of cooperating with Juntos in some kind of giant anti-government primary. He tried to negotiate such an arrangement for the legislative election but was stymied by the local CC and UCR. Still, his priority is clearly to unseat Todos by any means necessary and after his good result I'd imagine he'd have a much easier time convincing JxC to let him participate in their PASO under favourable conditions.

Whereas Milei has a much more ambitious (and crazy) goal: to unite the right wing of PRO, the remaining Federal Peronists and the various right wing provincial parties into a broad right of center coalition against both Kirchner and Larreta. Some of those he's mentioned include Patricia Bullrich, former Salta governor JM Urtubey, current Córdoba governor Juan Schiaretti and even ex-President Macri. If they somehow came together it would definitely be a major force with nationally recognized figures but having so many big heads could actually be a disadvantage. However much they might talk favourably of Milei to try to win his supporters, would the former President or the most notable Federal Peronist governor with presidential ambitions actually subordinate themselves to a wacky TV economist? My guess is not.

Nevertheless, he's already started travelling and generating press, with his first event in Formosa in support of a local libertarian leader arrested earlier in the year for protests that accused the local government of being dictatorial. This accusation was swiftly disproven when a kid that was at the event was identified and received a threatening friendly call from his teacher: "Gildo te tiene controlado, si fuiste a joder con ese Milei, perdiste"

Oh and also the poll by poll results map updated for the general election is up. Shoutout to station "Escuela N°05 Roberto Billinghurst" in Parque Avellaneda for being the only one where Milei won more votes than Vidal.