Venezuelan far-right opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia with far-right politician María Corina Machado (left) and Chavista candidate President Nicolás Maduro (right) during their electoral campaigns. Photo: Globovisión/Presidential Press.
Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodríguez dismissed the right-wing pollsters that are currently projecting the candidate of the Unitary Platform, Edmundo González Urrutia, as the winner of the upcoming Venezuelan presidential elections. He pointed out that these pollsters have failed in all their predictions during the last 10 years.
In a post on his X account on Thursday, July 11, the opposition sympathizer and founder of the organization Oil for Venezuela highlighted that the pollsters have made a mistake in overestimating the opposition vote and projecting results based on that overestimation without adjusting it to the historical predictive bias.
“The use of polls to predict elections in Venezuela faces a significant pitfall: the strong predictive errors of these pollsters in past elections. Most pollsters have highly overestimated the opposition vote since at least 2017,” the analyst noted.
El uso de encuestas para predecir elecciones en Venezuela enfrenta un escollo significativo: los fuertes errores predictivos de estas encuestadoras en elecciones pasadas. La mayoría de las encuestadoras ha sobreestimado fuertemente el voto opositor desde al menos 2017.
— Francisco Rodríguez (@frrodriguezc) July 11, 2024
“Seven pollsters with historical data have published opinion polls for 28 July,” he continued. “On average, they show a 28.4 point lead for Edmundo González against Nicolás Maduro. However, it is erroneous to make this projection based on this number without adjusting for historical predictive bias.”
Rodríguez, who is a professor at the University of Denver, added that these pollsters have overestimated the opposition vote by 27.8% on average in the last 10 years.
Allowing some concession, he noted that at most one could speak of a scenario of a very disputed election, “with virtually a technical tie between Nicolás Maduro and Edmundo González.”
“There are different interpretations about the source of the over-prediction bias of the opposition vote by most of the polls,” Rodríguez wrote. “On the one hand, there are those who think that it reflects the alteration of results in favor of the government by the electoral body. Other explanations are based on the change in the population structure. If emigration has been concentrated in opposition strongholds, the weightings used by the pollsters (based on the 2011 Census) may be giving greater weightages to regions with greater opposition support.”
The specialist also noted that a good performance by the sector supporting the re-election of President Nicolás Maduro would not be surprising. “Evidence shows that governments benefit electorally from increases in economic growth and decreases in inflation. According to the IMF, the economy has been growing since 2021 and inflation is at its lowest level since 2014,” he pointed out.
He also stressed that “the conclusion [by any sector] that the election is already won omits relevant analytical considerations.”
“Regardless of who wins, it will be necessary to seek coexistence agreements that lay the foundations for the necessary governability to channel the recovery and reinstitutionalization of the country,” he concluded.
Opposition’s “war of polls”
The first vice-president of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), Diosdado Cabello, said in his program Con El Mazo Dando that the people must be prepared for the coming war of polls of the opposition, as each sector is claiming that its candidate is the winning option.
“Let us get ready for their polls that will claim that they have 150% preference, just like [the opposition] in Mexico, then reality will come and hit them,” Cabello said.
He called upon the sectors of the Chavista coalition the Great Patriotic Pole to work for a “perfect victory” and not to get carried away by overconfidence. “The perfect victory must safeguard peace, because if one listens to the opposition one knows that this week the polls open will be more intense,” he added.
(LaIguana.TV) with Orinoco Tribune content
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/SC/DZ
