MEXICO CITY (Process).– It looks like a Greek tragedy. The oracle told Oedipus that he was going to kill his father and that he would lie with his mother. Even if he tried, the hero couldn’t avoid his fate. Something similar is happening with the fashionable oracle: polls. They risk becoming the shortest line between prophecy and a dire fate.
Morena decided a long time ago to resolve the nomination of her candidacies based on surveys. It is worth remembering that none of the other methods provided by this party for the same purpose is viable. This political force has a poor standard and the assembly model has been a disaster every time. As an example is the process that, in 2019, to replace Yeidckol Polevnsky as president of that political institute, where even chairs were thrown.
Unreflective copyists, the opposition parties are also contemplating using the survey as a method to achieve a unity candidacy that represents militants and sympathies as divergent as those that gravitate within National Action, the Institutional Revolutionary and the Party of the Democratic Revolution.
What other method, if not the polls, could be used by these three parties whose registers are also a disaster and whose structures are not reliable, at least when viewed from the balcony in front?
This is how the conclusion is reached that the polling oracle is the only one to resolve, for now, that key moment in any democracy, which is the legitimization of the options for popularly elected positions. Polls today are not the best method, as is said of democracy, but the least bad.
Such a thing does not mean that the tragedy is saved. The word “survey” actually hides many unknowns that deserve to be cleared up. There is the State of Mexico whose recent elections proved the superlative degree of uncertainty that the polling houses can throw up.
As a button are the results that Mario Delgado, national leader of Morena, sang on election Sunday. There he said that, based on the polls carried out outside the polling booth, two serious pollsters –Parametría and El Financiero– had predicted a victory for the morenista Delfina Gómez by more than 17 points.
The day after the euphoria subsided, it turned out that the real difference between the two options was 8.4 points. How to explain an error of that magnitude? In contrast, other houses such as Buendía Laredo, De las Heras or Mitofsky delivered results to their clients very similar to those that would be revealed by the Preliminary Electoral Results Program (PREP). In other words, they had reasonable differentials of between two and three points with respect to the final result.
A first lesson to ward off the tragedy would be to avoid hiring the polling houses that made the most serious mistakes. It is public, for example, that Morena usually hires Covarrubias. The same house that fifteen days before the election in the State of Mexico predicted a victory for Delfina Gómez of 24.4 points of difference with respect to her adversary, Alejandra del Moral. In this case, the error was 16 points, which could not be explained by the two weeks that elapsed between the uprising and the day of the elections.
The other pollster that commonly works for the ruling party is Mendoza Blanco & Asociados. This house was wrong by 15.4 points. On his side, Enkoll, which is also a supplier to Morena, missed by ten points.
These missteps cannot be considered anecdotal, especially since the political future of the nation could lie in the hands of these companies. Using the soccer metaphor, if it has already been decided that the pass from the quarterfinals to the semifinals will take place, not through the game of party militants, but through surveys, at least whoever plays the role of oracle does not charge to his credit with a bag of mistakes.
The same weekend of this publication the National Political Council of Morena will be meeting. This session was called to decide two things. The first is the license or, as the case may be, the resignation from the public positions currently held by the persons aspiring to participate in the survey. The second will be the type of survey to be carried out.
This item on the agenda has four subsections: 1) who will do the survey? 2) What question or questions will the questionnaire contain? 3) who will respond? and 4) how will the questions be answered?
The first issue has to do with choosing more than one polling firm from among those that have not made a fool of themselves with their insane numbers. The polling house that has a good track record, that is registered with the National Electoral Institute and that, in the event of doing its job poorly, runs the risk of losing its reputation, will provide certainty.
At least three companies should be selected to inhibit wrongdoing. The competition between them would make it necessary to maintain the greatest methodological rigor.
Regarding the issue of questions, it would provide greater certainty if only one question was asked and that it was easy to answer. Something like “who would you like to see occupy the Presidency between 2024 and 2030?”, or the traditional formula of “who would you vote for?”. Wrapping up the questionnaire with many arbitrarily weighted questions could create more problems than you want to address.
Regarding who would respond to the survey, it is clear that it will be carried out among the open population, which would indicate that not only people related to the movement will be questioned. Therefore, imposing a control question regarding Morenista affiliations would be an inefficient filter that, in addition, would give power loaded with arbitrariness to the pollster.
Finally, any other survey that is not on housing, face-to-face and based on a statistically well-constructed sample, should be banished. In other words, telephone or digital polls should be outlawed.
This set of criteria would reduce the tragedy of the oracle. In other words, the risk that one or more of the applicants decides to ignore the instrument, considering it merely an exercise to legitimize a previously established destiny.
It is predictable that, should such a thing happen, the possibility of seeing the movement divorced and thus witnessing its eventual defeat in 2024 is high.
