Mexican General Election, June 2, 2024

[jaichind]

Is MC polling well because it appeals to the "educated Progressive left" that doesn't like AMLO being PRI-lite?

MC is the personal political vehicle of Dante Delgado.   While it projects itself as Center-Left in some states where it is strong, like Compeche, Jalico, and Nuevo Leon, it is a de facto Center-Right force and eats into the PAN vote a lot of times.   I think their motto is "what ever it takes to get the votes which in turn gets us more state funding"

[MRCVzla]

Just to sum up, there's a political crisis in Nuevo León due to the attempt of State Governor Samuel García Sepúlveda to run as the MC' Presidential precandidate, when he was giving his licence to run for President, the State Congress with a majority against MC nominate another person not from MC, García and MC already tried twice to designate their temporary Governor, first to the President of the State Supreme Court and then to their General Secretary of his Government, the Congress after a chaotic session who García' followers raided designate Deputy Prosecutor Luis Enríque Orozco Suárez as the interim Governor with the votes of PAN, PRI, Morena and PVEM, García got mad and qualifies the designated interim as a "spurious", the Justice also got involved orders García does not separate from his position until it is defined who will remain definitively as interim governor, García says that the state's Superior Court of Justice does not have jurisdiction to stop his license, another Judge attempted to revoke Orozco' nomination but the Supreme Court orders his sworn. So today when the licence was come to effect, NL awake with two Governors, and in the end, seems Samuel is staying in NL and not running for President after all.

In opinion polls, García was still below 10%, and all still indicates a Sheinbaum' landslide.

[wnwnwn]

Eduardo Verástegui, the producer of Sound of Freedom, is collecting signs for his independient candidacy. If he succeeds, it would hurt 'Fuerza y Corazón por Mexico' (especially PAN voters).
If only AMLO supporters got some sense and strategically supported his inscription.

[Duke of York]

Barring something truly unexpected Sheinbaum is going to be the first woman president

[jaichind]

2024 Governor election polls has a status quo election

[wnwnwn]

Eduardo Verástegui, the producer of Sound of Freedom, is collecting signs for his independient candidacy. If he succeeds, it would hurt 'Fuerza y Corazón por Mexico' (especially PAN voters).
If only AMLO supporters got some sense and strategically supported his inscription.

His inscription was denied as he couldn't get enought signs, but he will continue his campaing as mexicans can vote for write in candidates in their elections.
His campaing still doesn't have much sense. He campaing as an anti AMLO camdidate, but he avoids talking about Galvez like she and her alliance didn't exist. Maybe if he can the image of 'the candidate of social conservatism' he could get some support even from some MORENA voters, but a pro Trump candidate isn't appealing for those mestizo soc-con, econ-center/centerleft voters he would need to have posibilities to enter the runoff. He will still get some support, and that may hurt Galvez if she can get the election closer.

[Flyersfan232]

Eduardo Verástegui, the producer of Sound of Freedom, is collecting signs for his independient candidacy. If he succeeds, it would hurt 'Fuerza y Corazón por Mexico' (especially PAN voters).
If only AMLO supporters got some sense and strategically supported his inscription.

His inscription was denied as he couldn't get enought signs, but he will continue his campaing as mexicans can vote for write in candidates in their elections.
His campaing still doesn't have much sense. He campaing as an anti AMLO camdidate, but he avoids talking about Galvez like she and her alliance didn't exist. Maybe if he can the image of 'the candidate of social conservatism' he could get some support even from some MORENA voters, but a pro Trump candidate isn't appealing for those mestizo soc-con, econ-center/centerleft voters he would need to have posibilities to enter the runoff. He will still get some support, and that may hurt Galvez if she can get the election closer.

mexico dont have runoffs

[MRCVzla]

And with the pre-campaign over, three will be the candidates standing in the June general election, along with Sheimbaun and Gálvez, the MC candidate o better said the one who Samuel García picked up is Jorge Álvarez Máynez, an almost unknown Zacatecas congressman. Presidential campaign will resume on February 29, and 3 debates (all in CDMX) will be hold during the campaign.

[jaichind]

https://twitter.com/AmericaElige/status/1748862174892523872

[jaichind]

The critical CDMX head election will also be held on the same day as the general election.  If there is going to be an anti-MORENA anti-incumbency swing it would be here. The  race is MORENA-PVEM-PT vs PAN-PRI-PRD vs MC.

Most polls have MORENA-PVEM-PT ahead of PAN-PRI-PRD by 10-15 points.  What is interesting here is how PRD collapsed and the anti-MORENA force is now really PAN which is heading the opposition alliance ticket.

The  MORENA-PVEM-PT candidate is Clara Brugada. Some info on her from 2009 and 2015

2009

Iztapalapa is just one of the 16 borroughs of Mexico City, but it is the largest and one of the poorest. It has nearly 2 million people, and is, in fact, one of the largest municipalities in the country. It is, traditionally, one of the PRD's major strongholds.

Iztapalapa used to be, more or less, the New Left territory. This time, though, PRD primary voters seemed to turn away from the faction.  On the election night the New Left "pre-candidate" for the post of the Iztapalapa delegado (a sort of "borrough president", though a bit more powerful), Silvia Oliva (herself, the wife of a former delegado and Congressman Rene Arce) was behind her lopezobradorista opponent, Carla Brugada. Oliva sued. The regional electoral chamber rejected her claims. Then, last week, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal overturned the lower chamber's ruling and ordered PRD to register Oliva as its candidate.

The local PRD leadership was, naturally, angry. To register her protest Alejandra Barrales took a "leave of absence" as the local party leader: the national party leaders would have to submit the court-ordered paperwork without her. But who really was rabid was Lopez Obrador. For a few days he tried negotiating, then he dropped a bomb: he would endorse the PT candidate, one Rafael (Juanito) Acosta.

But he would do it not so that Acosta could govern: in fact, he publicly ordered, in no uncertain terms, that, if elected Acosta resigns, so that Mayor Ebrard could appoint Brugada to the post.  Acosta did swear he would, but, incredibly, it turned out Ebrard was never consulted beforehand. In his usual (polite but ambiguous) manner Ebrard made that clear, before saying that, of course, he'd respect the wishes of Lopez in this case. In any case, he'd have an ample opportunity to renege, if he so likes, without making an open break: the appointment would have to be confirmed by the City Council. Of course, there is no question that the City Council will stay under the PRD control - it's quite another matter, though, for the United Left to have a majority on its own, or even w/ PT and Convergencia.

The official PRD leadership is now openly insensed. They've started to hint, that party members, who support candidates of other parties are supposed to be expelled from PRD (though they are saying, they'd only deal w/ it after July 5). Lopez says, he'll only go if forced to. His supporters are saying they'd all go with him, destroying the party.

Meanwhile, in Iztapalapa we have a true circus. It is too late to reprint the ballots, so Carla Brugada's name will stay. But all votes cast for Carla Brugada will be counted for Silvia Oliva. If you want Carla Brugada you are supposed to vote for Rafa Acosta (whom everyone knows, for some reason, as Juanito), who will resign in the hope that Carla Brugada would be nominated by the Mayor (and confirmed by the Council) instead. So, just to make clear: a vote for Carla is, really, a vote for Silvia. And to vote for Carla you should vote for Rafa, because Juanito promised Andres Manuel that he'd resign, so that Marcelo could nominate Carla (for an approval by a still unelected City Council). Everyone's with me?

2015

Iztapalapa - the largest borough of Mexico City. 1.8 mln people - bigger than many states. Morena heartland, if there is any. In fact, this is the one place where a Lopez Obrador candidate has run against PRD (and won) before. Shortly before the election day in 2009 an electoral tribunal ruled that the obradorista PRD candidate (Clara Brugada) was not properly nominated and that the candidacy will go to the runner-up in the PRD internal process. AMLO was enraged. He ordered his supporters to vote instead for the PT candidate - a semi-literate guy by the name of Rafael Acosta, but somehow known to the entire world as "Juanito".  In case of victory, Juanito was supposed to appoint Clara Brugada his second in command and then resign, leaving her acting delegada for the rest of the term. Well, Juanito won - but tried to renege and stay in the office. He was put under a lot of pressure, though, so his resistence did not last long, and Clara Brugada came to power.

Well, Morena is running this year... Clara Brugada, of course. This time there is no need of Juanito.

Reforma poll. Note that the top 5 candidates are all women

Clara Brugada (Morena) 41%
Dione Anguiano (PRD/PT/Panal) 28%
Adriana Torres (PRI/PVEM) 12%
Brisa Ortiz (PAN) 8%
Adriana Figueroa (PES) 6%
various males (MC, PH) 5%

[Frodo]

Mexico's ruling party presidential hopeful holds 16-point lead - poll

[Red Velvet]

https://twitter.com/AmericaElige/status/1748862174892523872

Completely in line with AMLO’s approval ratings in the 60s

[jaichind]

Completely in line with AMLO’s approval ratings in the 60s

It seems AMLO has successfully eaten up the old rural PRI machine vote outside of the Northern region.  This is why MORENA seems to be polling higher than even AMLO did back in 2018.

[jaichind]

As of 2023, MORENA controls states that make up 69.3% of all Mexico's Lower House seats.  The last time another party controlled so many states was PRI in 1996.  If MORENA can win the Prez position again this year then it is de facto the new PRI.

[Samof94]

As of 2023, MORENA controls states that make up 69.3% of all Mexico's Lower House seats.  The last time another party controlled so many states was PRI in 1996.  If MORENA can win the Prez position again this year then it is de facto the new PRI.

Didn't it lose some seats in 2021?

[jaichind]

As of 2023, MORENA controls states that make up 69.3% of all Mexico's Lower House seats.  The last time another party controlled so many states was PRI in 1996.  If MORENA can win the Prez position again this year then it is de facto the new PRI.

Didn't it lose some seats in 2021?

When I say "control" I mean governorship.  MORENA did not lose any governorships in 2021 or in fact ever.

[jaichind]

https://oraculus.mx/presidente2024/

Oraculus poll of polls for Prez race right now have it at

MORENA-PVEM-PT      62
PAN-PRI-PRD             32
MC                             6

[kaoras]

I recently checked PVEM web page and not only they now have actual ecology stuff there, but also things like "Justice with gender perspective" and so on.

I know it isn't sincere but I'm surprised they even bother with the pivot to a "woke progressive party". I thought that everybody accepted the fact that they were a glorified corruption machine that would sell their grandma for a spot in a ruling coalition.

[jaichind]

I recently checked PVEM web page and not only they now have actual ecology stuff there, but also things like "Justice with gender perspective" and so on.

I know it isn't sincere but I'm surprised they even bother with the pivot to a "woke progressive party". I thought that everybody accepted the fact that they were a glorified corruption machine that would sell their grandma for a spot in a ruling coalition.

I think they are doing this because their ally MORENA pays lip service to this sort of stuff.  I am not sure for how long since the MORENA vote is trending more rural and more likely more socially conservative.  MORENA and now PVEM saying all this stuff is an attempt to retain some of the legacy MORENA urban vote.

[jaichind]

https://www.elfinanciero.com.mx/encuestas-ef/2024/03/01/sheinbaum-arranca-con-50-y-xochitl-con-33/

"Sheinbaum starts campaign with 50% preferences; Xóchitl, with 33%"

MORENA-PVEM-PT      50
PAN-PRI-PRD             33
MC                             8

[jaichind]

MORENA is still well ahead in the vote for the head of CDMX.
With MORENA turning into the new PRI CDMX would be the place where you should see some dropoff in MORENA support.  So far that does not seem to be the case. 

[jaichind]

Reforma poll has

MORENA-PVEM-PT ahead of PAN-PRI-PRD 58-34 with MC at 8


Legislative vote tracks Prez vote

MORENA-PVEM-PT      56
PAN-PRI-PRD             34
MC                              8

which would put the MORENA bloc at a landslide victory level in the legislature and exceed its seat count back in 2018
 

[JimJamUK]

Can anyone give us a summary of the Mexican political parties? Ideology (such as it exists), who votes for them etc.

[Estrella]

Can anyone give us a summary of the Mexican political parties? Ideology (such as it exists), who votes for them etc.

PRI: the party of the winning side of the 1910s Mexican Revolution and its secular, nationalist and egalitarian (but not socialist) ideals. Their ideology could be described as Mexican Peronism, except that PRI was extremely anti-personalist: they enshrined the sacred Mexican rule of no reelección and every president served one term and then bowed out. PRI presidents ranged from fairly radical left-wingers idolized by the people (Lázaro Cárdenas) to pragmatic progressives (Adolfo López Mateos) to corrupt quasi-feudal statists (José López Portillo) to 80s Thatcherite neoliberals (Miguel de la Madrid) and everything in between. Today, PRI's ideology is best described as 'corruption über alles'. At first, their base was everyone (they used to win very credible Putinesque results until the 1980s), then everyone except CDMX middle class, then most people in rural and poor areas, and now it's basically just random personal machines plus people who like some PRI politicians that are particularly good at cringe populism.

PRD: the outgrowth of left-wing PRI factions led by Lázaro Cárdenas' son Cuauhtémoc who in 1988 led the first real challenge to the PRI rule, plus minor genuine (PSUM, PMT) and controlled (PPS, PARM, PFCRN) left-wing opposition parties. In the 90s and 00s they were the party of educated CDMX middle class, urban working class in some cities and the poor, heavily mestizo/indigenous south of the country. Today they're significantly weaker and dependent on the good graces of the rest of the opposition. Ideologically they used to be a big tent ranging from Blairites to PRI-ish types to hard left Chavistas, now they're fairly unremarkable socdems.

Morena: the party of ex-PRD leader and current president AMLO, representing the old PRI way of doing politics with a veneer of modern left-wing progressivism (think Cristina Kirchner). AMLO is genuinely popular – he's very good at populism, he was the main face of the opposition against Fox, Calderón and EPN and while his term was not what I'd call successful, he's still better than his corrupt, self-serving, arrogant and criminally incompetent predecessor and has a better image than the opposition coalition, seen (not incorrectly) as desperate, discredited and held together only by a shared desire for power. Morena also took over most of the still powerful PRI machines, which certainly helps.

PT: a cranky far-left party mostly concerned with praising Kim Jong Un and such silliness. They were thrust into relevance when AMLO used them to support his candidates after falling out with the PRD. They have little genuine popular support and are mostly a clientelistic machine for various AMLO-adjacent people.

PVEM: an actual criminal organization that puts even PRI to shame. Their best-known policy proposal was bringing back the death penalty and their strongholds are basically just places where they bought the most votes. A good rule of thumb for Mexican politics is to vote against any coalition that includes PVEM. The thankfully (mostly) dead "liberal" PANAL was a similar beast.

PAN: founded as the party representing clerical Catholics, the losing side of the Revolution and the Cristero War. Over time they transformed into something resembling a normal Western conservative party, although they're still pretty centrist economically. Vicente Fox (2000-2006) and Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) were the first non-PRI presidents after nearly a century of one-party rule. Fox didn't fulfill the high expectations placed on him, but he was basically okay. Calderón, on the other hand, was an abject disaster: his lasting legacy is the outbreak of the cartel war. The party is strongest in the centre and north of Mexico, historically (but perhaps not today) more clerical, but more importantly richer, more white and closer to the US in settlement patterns (ethnically cleansed and parceled out among large white-owned farms, as opposed to indigenous subsistence agriculture in the south).

A few years ago I wrote some more things to do with this:

Well, PRI's dominance of Mexican politics was built, among other standard authoritarian things, on their control of labor unions, genuine popular satisfaction with economic growth, a nationalist left-wing mythology about self-determination and tons and tons of pork to local officials and their GOTV machines. This worked relatively well until the 1980s, when Miguel de la Madrid became president. An economic crisis, unpopular neoliberal reforms, entry into NAFTA, government's horrifying incompetence in the aftermath of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake and the population being fed up with PRI in general opened a window of opportunity for the opposition. The old conservative PAN was unable to take advantage of it, but when Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas (a son of PRI's most radical and revered president Lázaro Cárdenas) left the party along with his machines, joined with small partidos paraestatales and started campaigning, the PRI regime was becoming increasingly wobbly.

In the end, PRI was saved in the 1988 election by a very well-timed failure of the results reporting system. In the next election, in 1994, PRI got a big sympathy vote after their would-be candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was assassinated and won comfortably (there's an old thread somewhere where jaichind explains his theory that many PRI machines simply refused to turn out in '88, but went back to work in '94),

When the next election came in 2000, an emboldened opposition rallied behind PAN's candidate, Vicente Fox*. PRI couldn't have chosen a worse candidate - Francisco Labastida, an apparatchik up to eyeballs in corruption scandals. And that's how PRI lost for the first time in 70 years, though Fox's (Foxes?) huge margin still surprised everybody.

* In case you're wondering what the guy is up to now, besides tell Drumpf to go f*** himself: Former Mexican President Fox Joins Board Of Cannabis Magazine High Times

During the era of PRI dominance, PAN was the sole "genuine" opposition party. Thanks to PRI's good graces and desire to present Mexico as a democratic-ish country, they got allocated some legislative seats and local offices, though always less than their level of popular support (single digit percentages throughout the 70s, later rising to somewhere between 10-20%). PAN was the party of hardcore Catholics, economic liberals and civic-minded anti-PRI middle class in rich, well-educated places like CDMX and Baja California.

The discontent that arose during the 80s came from a very different place. Left-wing intellectuals and PRI cadres were frustrated at the party for abandoning its traditional nationalist and statist orientation. These groups formed a faction with PRI, Corriente Democrática, led by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. The common people, on the other hand, were suffering from an economic crisis, soaring inflation, unemployment and black market. PRI's economic management until then was hardly a success story, but there was a feeling that things are getting better, and that feeling was now replaced with a cold shower.

The old PRI managed to keep every part of its big tent satisfied not just by clientelism, but also by the fact that dedazo - the system for determining the next president - was kept ideologically balanced. Thus, in 1982, nationalizing López Portillo was replaced by privatizing de la Madrid. When it became clear that de la Madrid is going to be succeeded by another right-wing technocrat, Cárdenas left the party and together with PRI's small far-left satellites formed the Frente Democrático Nacional.

Now, if common people steeped in Mexican revolutionary mythology didn't like what PRI was doing - and a lot of them didn't - they had two options to vote for. On the one hand, the son of Lázaro Cárdenas - a folk hero for many poor Mexicans who laid the ground for a relatively prosperous social order that was now being destroyed by selling the country out, and who now owned many PRI machines with all the incentives to vote that came with them. On the other hand, the candidate of a permanent opposition party of out-of-touch metropolitans who probably wanted the technocrats to go even further. For these people, the choice was simple.

[wnwnwn]

MORENA is still well ahead in the vote for the head of CDMX.
With MORENA turning into the new PRI CDMX would be the place where you should see some dropoff in MORENA support.  So far that does not seem to be the case. 

I suppose the PAN will win at Benito Juarez and Miguel Hidalgo, but areas like Iztapalapa are AMLO's base.