The Power and the Money

Was the Mexican election stolen?

 

Was fraud decisive in the Mexican presidential election? Well, in the sense of fraudulent vote-counting, no. But what about vote-buying? The PRI stands accused of bribing people to vote for them. Moreover, cellphones have provided a new way of circumventing the secret ballot: to get the bribe, the voter needs to zap a picture of his or her ballot. Pretty nifty stuff! More prosaically, the PRI-Green coalition hired children to watch the voting and report back.

Still, at the end of the day, Peña won by a margin of 3.2 million votes. My friend Alberto Simpser calculates that there it would have been expensive for the PRI to have bought enough votes to swing it. Here’s his calculation (modified slightly by yours truly to account for an apparent arithmetic mistake):

First, the PRI needs to swing a minimum of 1.6 million votes from the PRD to win. Second, reports show bribes between 100 and 1,800 pesos per voter. (Note the final “r”!) Youtube indicates that 100 pesos was small enough to backfire. Alberto goes with ₱700, which is consistent with data from the 2000 election (after adjusting for inflation) of a cost of ~₱500. Finally, bribing a voter is not the same as getting his or her vote. Data from a 2004 survey of Argentines implies a vote-buying efficacy of around 16%. So ... the minimum cost of buying the election is: ₱700 × 1.6 million ÷ 16% = ₱7 billion, or US$560 million.

That is a significant chunk of change. Of course, if you assume that the PRI is better at targeting its vote-buying than Argentine parties (which is not unreasonable) the cost goes down.

At 33% efficiency, the minimum cost of buying the election drops to $272 million. Even at an impossible 100%, the coalition would still need $90 million. That is a significant chunk of change: legal spending by the PRI-Green coalition came to only $111 million. Alberto concludes that although the PRI could have raised such sums, they should be detectable. For what it’s worth, the PRD claims to have evidence that the PRI-Green coalition spent $320 million.

To recap: Alberto is not arguing that the amount needed to buy the election is too large to carry out! He is arguing that the amount is too large to hide.

When evaluating the morality of the situation, as opposed to the legality, readers should keep in mind what exactly the PRI stands accused of. It matters whether voters were offered store coupons or offered rides to the polls, both being illegal under Mexican law. Consider the list of illegal behavior on election day reported by the Alianza Cívica, with the percentages reporting the activity:

1. Someone came to your door to insure that you voted (5.6%);
2. You were offered breakfast (2.3%);
3. You were called by phone (2.1%);
4. You received a gift (1.7%);
5. Someone tried to take your voter ID (1.0%);
6. Someone offered to take your voter ID to the polls (0.3%);
7. Someone gave you a pamphlet (0.3%);
8. Someone offered you a ride to the polls (0.8%).

Well, I worked heavily in North Carolina in 2008 and in Florida in 2004. (I also worked on New York local elections in 1988 and 1989.) The GOP in New York and the Democrats in Florida and N.C. all engaged in nos. (1), (2), (3), (7), and (8) quite legally. They also did a little bit of (4), not so legally. (Google “walking-around money.”) 

I find it hard to be outraged about (1), (2), (3), (7), and (8). After all, not all that is legal is moral, and not all that is illegal is immoral. That said, an argument can be made that political parties need to be held to a higher standard: they should avoid all illegal behavior (regardless of morality) and a pretty good chunk of legal behavior as well. My point is only that 1988 this is not, but I can be convinced that I should be more outraged than I am.

Esther Gordillo wins Congress! Mexico, though, loses.

 Who is Esther Gordillo and how did she win Congress, you ask? Give me a moment for that issue. First, we have some quasi-official Congressional results. The preliminary estimates appear to have been remarkably inaccurate. (Diego Valle, can you explain that?)

In the Senate, the PRI-Green alliance has picked up 48 senators directly and 13 seats via P.R., for a total of 61, four short of a majority. In the House, the PRI-Green alliance has taken 157 districts plus 83 party-list seats. That is eleven seats shy of a majority. (It is also a full twenty districts less than the preliminary post-election count.)

The New Alliance Party (aka “Panal”) won another ten P.R. seats. If the PRI can convince the Panal to support them, that would provide 250 votes.

Now 250 votes aren’t quite enough for a majority. The Mexican constitution contains no tie-breaking provisions. Article 142 of the House internal rules states only that in the event of a tie, the House will immediately vote again.

If still tied, they vote again the next day, at which point that’s it. (Unless the matter is really pressing, in which case they will hope for a miracle, or something. Really! Go read the rules at the above link.) So the PRI will need 251 votes to pass legislation through the lower house. With the Panal plus one independent or PAN defector, they will have it.

Which brings us to Elba Esther Gordillo and the Panal. Gordillo heads the national teachers union (SNTE). Now, I am aware that Republicans like to prattle on about the power of the teachers unions in the United States. That is because Republicans do not know what a real union looks like. Gordillo is immensely powerful, and immensely corrupt. Frex, on an official salary of $26,910 a year she somehow bought a house in San Diego for $1.7 million, in the same neighborhood as Mitt Romney.

The SNTE was part of the PRI machine, but split in 2006 to support the PAN. As part of that split, the union created its own political party, the Panal. Lest there be some confusion, Patrick Corcoran reminds us that the top two positions in the Panal bureaucracy went respectively to Gordillo’s daughter and Gordillo’s personal secretary. Gordillo could have just thrown her votes to the PAN directly, but creating a party gave her more flexibility ... and access to federal election subsidies. Panal did not run a presidential candidate in ‘06, but it did picked up nine seats in the House and elected one senator.

This year, Panal ran its own candidate for president, the hapless and vaguely hipster-looking Gabriel Quadri. The reason was to leave Gordillo’s options open for post-election negotiations. The SNTE has 1.2 million members and managed to pull in about that many votes for Quadri, plus 1.7 million votes for the Panal’s congressional slate, enough for ten deputies and a senator.  

Now, my prediction is that given its internal splits, the PAN will not resort to a Republican-style strategy of unified opposition. That will reduce Gordillo’s leverage. That said, she will be the PRI’s easiest route to a working majority in the lower house, giving her something close to a veto. In other words, it is probably the best possible result from La Maestra’s point of view.

But it is a bad result for Mexico. Not the worst, but bad. For those who still wonder why (the $1.7 million house wasn’t enough?) read this article from the Economist.

Ms. Gordillo is not the sort of person you want in a position of power, and this election gives her more power.

Election update: PRI loses Senate, and recounts afoot!

OK, we now have better results ... and I’m now reading them correctly. (The previous post used the wrong numbers.)

In the Senate, the PRI-Green coalition won 18 states, 36 seats. They came in second in 10 more, for 46 seats in total. In the P.R. vote, though, the PRI will only pick up 10 seats, and its Green allies another two. That’s 58 seats, seven shy of the 65 needed for a majority. The

House still might be PRI. 174 districts for the PRI-Green coalition, plus 80 P.R. seats, for a bare majority of 254.

Large-scale recounts are underway. To be honest, I do not understand why they don’t just change the law and make a full recount automatic.

Postelection roundup: Polls blow it, PRI likely takes Congress, and AMLO calls fraud

 I hope those of you with interest in the race were turning to Diego Valle. He took on the challenge with aplomb, and his blog became the go-to data-driven place for election news.

The polls substantially overstated Peña’s lead in the run-up to the election. My initial thought was that the undecideds broke for AMLO, but Diego’s evidence is that the polls had a systematic bias. Considering the prevalent use of face-to-face polling, and that the polls were more accurate in 2006, that’s surprising, but the information should lead to better polling in the future. (And good job offers for Mr. Valle, I hope.)

The results are still not in, but it looks like the PRI will take Congress. So far the PRI (or the hard-to-explain PRI-Green coalition) has won 187 out of the 300 first-past-the-post districts. They also appear to have gotten 58% of the congressional vote (tossing the Greens running alone, who did not make the 2% threshold) which (I think! It gets complicated) will give them more-or-less 116 of the PR seats. That is rather more than 250, and thus they should have a majority in the House.

The Senate is less clear. The PRI won 18 states outright, which gives them 36 out of 128 senators. They appear to have come in second in 13 more states, upping their total to 49. Then the two received about 56% of the vote, which will give them (once again, more-or-less, it’s complicated) another 17 seats for a total of 66 ... a 2-vote majority. Recounts and the complications of the PR process could lose them that edge.

Finally, it looks like AMLO is calling fraud. It is indubitably true that the election was far from perfect: see some evidence on Mex Files, and note that the early reporting system clearly broke down for a while. But that, of course, is far from saying that the election was fraudulent. This stuff from Anonymous is entertaining, but not credible, and the anecdotal evidence is, well, anecdotal; only PRI-favoring errors have been reported.

After 2006, I get worried about these sorts of claims. A legal challenge is one thing, once again going to the streets or occupying Congress is quite another. Richard Grabman predicts more such events; I can only hope that he is wrong. Considering that the margins in most districts are quite substantial (and the overall presidential margin ain’t nada) I suspect that he is.

But I do not know. I worry, at least a little. But let’s stay optimistic!

Victory! For Spain ... and (we hope) for Mexico

 We know the result in the European Cup! Great game, and a most unexpected blowout. Poor Balotelli.

We won’t know the results of the Mexican election for a few hours yet. Absent a truly earth-shattering surprise, though, the details are for the Congressional vote: did the PRI win a majority or not?

In the meantime, here is some food for thought. Four things. First, Mexican face-to-face polling may be the future, as Americans give up land lines. (And, as importantly, become less eager to answer the calls that do come in.) Second, the Economist argues for political reform, but I encourage you to doubt whether the reforms being mooted will make any noticeable difference to Mexican governance. (If there is interest, I will explain my doubts.) Third, consider that the biggest damn difference that any Mexican government can make regarding any damn issue facing the country is to raise more public revenue. The PRI has floated the idea of higher taxes, and there are reforms afoot that might (might! maybe!) reverse the decline in Mexican oil output.

Finally, though, remember at the end of the day that politics exists for two reasons. First, to give us a way to decide on public issues that don’t involve violence. Second, to make the society a better place for its weakest members. And with that, I give you this picture of a little girl in Iztapalapa, D.F., in front of her home ... a home where the family puts out tarpaulins to capture rainwater, where the streets regularly flood, where wages are tiny, where crime is high, and where this brilliantly smart little girl will attend schools that are barely able to teach her any more than her heroic parents already have. None of that is fair, not by my lights.

It might be cheesy, but f--k that. It’s people like this family that make you remember why all this matters.

Uncertainty and certainty, European soccer v. Mexican politics

 Uncertainty involves the game that starts today at 2:45pm EST. My wife pointed out to me that my mother is probably spinning in her grave right now, considering her lack of attachment to the madre patria. (In a European competition, she would be have been more likely to root for the Netherlands than the land of our ancestors.) Me, on the other hand, I revel in the victories won by our distant cousins!

Of course, everyone in America who doesn’t think I’m Puerto Rican thinks I’m Italian-American. (Which, to be brutally frank, I am, if we abstract away from such technicalities as my ancestry.) And how could I not like the pair of Balotelli and Buffon? But I think the furia roja is equipped to keep Pirlo in a box ... and we have Llorente (from Navarra, where my grandfather was born!) and Soldado. Plus, Casillas is an awesome goalie, and Iniesta an awesome striker. (Yes, I know he plays midfield.)

It’ll be a great game no matter what, unless the two sides resort to a defensive fallback like Spain’s last game or that miserable Italy-England soccer Stalingrad. I want the furia roja to win, but it matters not.

Today’s election in Mexico, unlike the soccer match, involves almost no uncertainty at all about the result. Enrique Peña Nieto is going to win. The polls are unanimous on that point. On the other hand, there is a great deal of uncertainty about whether it matters. From looking at campaign ads, it all seems pretty inane.

But it is not inane. How much is at stake hinges on three known unknowns:

1. What does Peña Nieto want?
2. What power will he have to accomplish (1) above?
3. What will be the consequences of the subset of (1) and (2)?

Gabriel Aguilera summed up well the dilemma of question (1): does Peña Nieto want to be a great Mexican president, or does he want to be a great Priísta? That is, does he want to leave his country in better shape regardless of the consequences to his party, or does he want to leave his party more powerful regardless of the consequences to his country?

Of course, it isn’t really a dilemma but a continuum ... and sometimes, as it took the Obama administration way too damn long to learn, good policy is good politics. But that aside, the above really is the first question.

Here is a good essay on just how bad it could be if Peña wants to be a great Priísta. Jeffrey Weldon thinks that is his aim. The Economist does not. The writer of this graffiti disagrees with the Economist.

 And then there is question (2). The Mexican president, unlike his or her Argentine counterpart, really is a weak figure. Now, that is not true when seen from the North: they have two advantages over their U.S. counterparts and one advantage over their Democratic U.S. counterparts. First, only one two executive positions requires congressional approval: the attorney-general and the treasury secretary. Second, the Senate of Mexico has no filibuster and no holds and none of the other insanity that has accumulated around the Senate of America. In addition, the entire Mexican senate is elected at the same time as the President, which makes it more likely for the President to have a majority, as does the presence of the electoral list senators. Finally, Mexican parties are generally more disciplined than the Democratic Party, although not as disciplined as the Republicans.

(For a description of the Mexican Senate, see here. For those bothered by my use of “America” to mean the United States, go away.)

That said, the Mexican president is nonetheless weak as American presidents go. (For those bothered by the above use of “America” to mean the entire Western Hemisphere, go away. Consistency, hobgoblins, all that.) He or she has no true decree power, and cannot introduce bills into the legislature nor command the legislative agenda. On the margin the Mexican presidency is slightly more powerful than the president of the U.S. of A., but rather less so than most other presidents in this hemisphere. Therefore ...

... It will matter a lot whether the PRI has a congressional majority.

The wrinkle is that the PRI has lost a lot of its national discipline: the Priístas I spoke to over the past week have told me that the party has evolved into a series of state-level fiefdoms, where the governor effectively chooses the congressional candidates, and machines are perpetuated by having the governor switch offices with senators and deputies and then switch back. That means that the congressional PRI will want President Peña to be a great Priísta, and not necessarily a great President. In such a world it might be better for President Peña to lack a PRI majority.

As long as the PAN and PRD decide that they will not be served by a GOP-like strategy of automatic opposition (and I suspect that they will not be so served), a Peña who wants to serve his country could build cross-party majorities. Remember, Mexico has no filibuster; its Senate (unlike ours) functions as an ordinary legislature. In short, it will be good if the PRI does well in Congress, but not quite well enough to secure a majority in both houses.

Finally, there is question (3). The problem with it is that there is no way to tell until we have the answer to questions (1) and (2). In the field of security policy, I am with Patrick Corcoran (see part one and part two): there is unlikely to be much change. But in economic policy, there could be; ditto in political reform.

I will discuss more later about what I think the answers are to the above questions. Right now, I just want to say that every Mexican needs to answer (1), (2), and (3) for themselves, and then go out and vote. After which, root for the madre patria!

Mexico is gaining jobs, not wages

In 2009, in the wake of rapid inflation, Chinese unit labor costs were 72% of Mexico’s. (See page 19 at the link.) By early 2010, Chinese unit labor costs had risen to 86% of the Mexican level, and Mexico started to export cars to China. For some goods, landed costs (i.e., the cost of manufacturing and moving to the mainland U.S.) are much cheaper in Mexico than in China.

If you only look at the Chinese side, there seems little prospect of these trends turning around. China is experiencing bad labor shortages. Moreover, China has an inflation problem (the strategies described in this post seem to be hitting their limit) and its low inflation of 3% is not much lower than Mexico’s higher-than-expected 3.9%. Meanwhile, the peso is falling, while the yuan is likely to head nowhere but up. (If that turns out to be wrong, expect bad political consequences.)

On the other hand, if you look at the Mexican side, the reason Mexico is gaining competitiveness is that wages are flat. And flat at a low level. The good news is that Mexico is seeing rapid employment growth (see chart below) but Mexico no longer has endless millions of peasants to pull into the cities. Job growth is a good thing, of course, but it can go only go on for so long. (Mexico rebased its employment measures in 2010; thus the two indices.)

Translation: this is good news for Mexico, but it is a one-time thing. Without productivity growth, either within industries or by shifting into new products, Mexico wll remain relatively poor.

Implication: if the U.S. economy ever picks up again, so will emigration.

Omission: the effect of violence and extortion. The jury is out.

El perro que no ladra

 One strange thing about the upcoming Mexican election is how little the economy seems to matter. I don’t mean questions of long-term growth or distribution; those are very much an issue. I mean short-term business cycle stuff. Manufacturing output is up. The peso is down, but the central bank seems relaxed. Judging from the results on inflation-linked bonds, so are the markets. Consumer confidence has followed suit. Nobody is running a campaign like the ones in the United States or Europe. Growth since the 2008 shock is slow, but steady, as the below chart of GDP (in millions of 2003 pesos) shows.

To be frank, I was worried three years ago. But the bad economy dog did not bark. Why not?

Well, I was worried that Mexico was going the austerity route. But it didn’t! Mexico was no paragon of countercyclical fiscal policy, but it avoided anything that could be called austerity. I wrote the above entry in the third quarter of 2009 ... during which government spending was essentially flat, much less than the programmed 0.7% drop. (See below chart, which shows growth in GDP expenditures between government purchases of goods and services and everything else.) In short, my fear didn’t materialize because the PAN government never followed through with its own austerity rhetoric.

Still, simply not being stupid isn’t really enough to explain Mexico’s quick recovery. Lots of countries failed to implement sufficiently large stimulus packages and suffered for it. To explain Mexico we need to turn to two other Mexican strengths and a bit of good luck.

The first strength is, paradoxically, also a weakness: Mexico had a terrible terrible financial system going into the Lesser Depression. But from the point of view of protection from the effects of a worldwide financial freezeup, it was a great thing to go in with banks that did not lend and firms that did not borrow. (I do not recommend this as a long-term growth strategy.)

That meant that the Lesser Depression hit Mexico as a good old-fashioned trade shock. The below graph measures quarterly percentage changes in the final demand for Mexican production. (It is not the same as GDP, since GDP nets out imports.) You can watch exports plummet in the last quarter of 2008. Net exports barely budged (in fact, they grew) but all those unemployed export workers dragged down private consumption and all those hurting export manufacturers stopped investing. Thus the vertiginous decline in GDP in the first quarter of 2009 that you can see in the above two charts. (Demand continued to fall in the second quarter of 2009, but manifested as a drop in imports, leaving GDP flat.)

But this brings us to Mexico’s second strength: a flexible exchange rate. The peso plunged from a little under a dime to a low of 7¢ before recovering. (In point of fact, the Banco de México intervened to stop the fall, too soon in my opinion.) By the third quarter of 2009, exports had started growing again. By the second quarter of 2010, they surpassed their previous peak. In point of fact, Mexico became even more export oriented than before: exports grew from 26% in the middle of 2008 of GDP to 35% by the middle of 2012.

And that brings us to the good luck. Any guesses before I post? It seems to have been in the news lately.

Guest post: My problem with AMLO

 This is Patrick Corcoran, from Ganchoblog.

In general, I don’t find the arguments that Andrés Manuel López Obrador (aka AMLO) is a grave economic risk to Mexico to be very convincing. His program isn’t particularly extreme. Rogelio Ramírez de la O (his proposed finance minster) is sharp, experienced, and within the economic mainstream. And most importantly, between its business community, central bank autonomy, and NAFTA, there’s something of a policy straightjacket in Mexico. I don’t think anyone should expect a Kirchner a la mexicana should AMLO pull off the upset, and if I were a fund manager or a currency speculator, his election alone wouldn’t do all that much to change my opinion of Mexico’s prospects.

The problem is this: AMLO’s democratic commitment has wavered time and again. This is something that he has demonstrated repeatedly over the past six years. The reaction to the 2006 loss was a big part of that, but it’s not the only example. The takeovers of Congress were shameful. The shenanigans in Ixtapalapa treated the democratic process in an area of almost 2 million residents as though it existed only to serve him. And there’s no reason to think that this would change. When asked if he would accept the results of the election in July, a question where the only acceptable answer is an unqualified “Yes,” he waffled. His moderation during the campaign has been laudable, but when faced with a narrow defeat of an agenda item he holds precious, I don’t believe that he’ll just take his lumps and move on. Unfortunately, taking your lumps and moving on is a basic element of democracy.

The counterargument to this is that AMLO has been justified in his more extreme actions — that is, the election was a fraud, and the oil reform proposals being tossed around were a vital threat to Mexico’s well-being. Clearly AMLO seems to believe that; he couches his reaction in 2006 as a defense of democracy, notwithstanding his sending the institutions to the diablo. Given the fraud in the 1994 Tabasco race and President Fox’s 2005 push to deprive him of his legal immunity when he was mayor of Mexico City, I can understand him assuming any opposition to him is illegitimate. But while this bias is understandable on a personal level, that doesn’t make it any less worrying or damaging. Over the past six years, there isn’t much to support his belief that he was acting in democracy’s defense: the case for outright fraud in 2006 is extremely weak and has been contradicted by numerous people on the left, and his opinions regarding Pemex are just that — opinions — and have no more inherent value than those who would privatize the company tomorrow (which is certainly not what I’m advocating). The “desperate times, et cetera” explanation for AMLO’s unorthodox actions over the past six years just doesn’t hold up, and if your bar for the barbarians being lined up at the gates is set so low, well, then, what crushing political loss doesn’t justify an assault on the system?

That’s not to imply that his opponents would necessarily make better leaders. There’s also a pretty good argument to be made that the (potential) insidious erosion of democracy from within under Peña Nieto would far more harmful than AMLO’s frontal assault, which has typically been conducted in plain view of the public. If Peña Nieto turns out to be as bad as many assume he will — that is, if he is an old-school PRI dinosaur in a pricey suit — the damage could well be much worse than what is at risk in an AMLO presidency. Even if that doesn’t happen, by all indications Peña Nieto is the lightest of lightweights, and the campaign doesn’t seem to have put much weight on his bones. And the defects of Vázquez Mota are so obvious and damning that they hardly bear mentioning. From my point of view, there is no right candidate, and this is the worst slate of candidates of any Mexican election that I am more than passingly familiar with (basically, from 1988 onward).

But now that AMLO has emerged as the optimistic, anti-Peña Nieto candidate, it’s important to be clear about what his drawbacks are. Support for AMLO carries risks that go well beyond ideology. Electing AMLO would mean entrusting the system to someone who doesn’t wholly believe in it.

Maybe the game isn’t on after all, plus health policy!

Well. There may not yet be an equivalent of Fivethirtyeight for the Mexican election, but the poll of polls doesn’t look good for AMLO. You gotta stare really hard to see any sign of movement. Enrique Peña Nieto (EPN) is still cruising towards victory with a plurality of the vote. (Mexico, I have to add, does not have a French-style runoff system nor an Australian-style transferable vote. This is a bad thing.) 

It seems odd — but not surprising! — that the biggest issues in the election are the least discussed. Oh, they both get mentioned in short ads (see below) but not much in concrete terms. I am referring, of course, to crime and health policy. The latter should be a big issue. While Mexico has made great strides in public health over the past 18 years, it is still far from universal coverage. So what do the two main candidates propose? (My apologies, Josefina.)

Well, both AMLO and EPN think it ridiculous that Mexico has a multiplicity of public health systems: one for formal sector workers, one for government employees (both run like the U.K. National Health Service) and a bare-bones People’s Insurance program for the poor. So it will be no surprise that both are calling for universal coverage. AMLO, however, wants change to be incremental. He wants to allow patients to receive services in the installations of any of the public health programs, a de facto conversion of the federal government’s role to something more like a single-payer system. The problem, of course, is a combination of complexity and vested interests. Peña Nieto is more direct: he wants a new Universal Social Security System, which he claims would cut overhead expenses from 9.5% to 3% and de jure move Mexico to Canadian-style Medicare. He also wants to provide more free medicines via a voucher system, with no word on how to pay for it.

So who would you trust? EPN has a better, more-concrete plan. AMLO is more serious about these things, and incremental change is generally easier. At the end of the day, AMLO is more honest about the inevitability of the need to throw more money at the problem ... but at the end of the day, a President AMLO is also more likely to be hamstrung by Congress.

Edge: AMLO. Not that it matters.

Game on, México!

 Wow. Oh wow. Big news in the Mexican presidential race.

Courtesy of Ganchoblog, it seems that the Mexican presidential blowout that we all expected for Enrique Peña Nieto may not actually happen. The Reforma newspaper runs reputable polls, and they show a sudden collapse in PRI presidential support from 42% to 38%, with AMLO rising from 27% to 34%. Now, I remember drinking pulque (horrible stuff, by the way) with some friends in Melchor Ocampo (awful town, I should add, although worth visiting) and being told that the polls meant nothing, AMLO could pull it out. I scoffed. Distant relatives in Huixquilucan (a very much not-awful town, at least if you like bad science fiction movies from the 1970s, but really not worth visiting unless you know somebody who lives there) said the same. But they were PRD partisans, and so I scoffed some more.

But they were all correct! If this poll holds, then the electoral game is on. We will have a real race on our hands, and not a PRI blowout. Both Melchor Ocampo and Huixquilucan are in Mexico State and under the Peña governorship. I think that gave my friends tacit knowledge about the fragility of his support that nerdy old gringo me could not appreciate. I think Mr. Hootsen, who also lives in Mexico State, would concur.

Were I voting in the election, a poll like this would pose a dilemma. I despise AMLO for his actions after the 2006 election. But I suspect, for reasons I find distressingly hard to verbalize, that he would be less damaging to Mexico than a President Peña. Which means that strategically speaking, if AMLO had a chance, I would want to cast a strategic vote for him. Except ... his behavior and statements in 2006. The questions raised by the commentators here are becoming much more valid. Assuming that the poll holds and we really do have a race, for whom should a concerned Mexican citizen vote?

I would like to end with a call for someone to start a blog like Fivethirtyeight, aimed at the Mexican elections. So far, the Reforma poll is an outlier. We have no way of judging its accuracy or predicting the result. Mexico could use a Fivethirtyeight. I nominate Diego Valle to start it.

Positive campaigning is not all that it’s cracked up to be

 The 2006 presidential campaign in Mexico was especially nasty, with television ads claiming that AMLO was the second coming of Hugo Chávez and would destroy the country if elected. Mexico, however, lacks an equivalent of the First and Fourteenth amendments and, more importantly, the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of both. (Article 6 of the Mexican constitution guarantees freedom of speech, “unless it offends good morals, infringes the rights of others, incites to crime, or disturbs the public order.” Article 7 unconditionally guarantees the right to write and publish, but that is more specific than speech in general.)

The result of the election, then, was a 2007 law that prohibited negative campaigning. (Mr. López Obrador’s subsequent behavior, and whether that retroactively justified otherwise scurrilous ads, is not relevant to this discussion.) The result is an oddly anodyne bunch of ads. TV ads emphasize personality, as do the print ads from the three major parties. The PRI candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, is also running on the Green Party ticket, however, and is using that platform to run a bunch of rather interesting issue statements:

My favorite is “Life sentences for kidnappers,” but I didn’t get a picture. Above you have a subway ad proclaiming “Pensions for all adult over age 65” and “Your place guaranteed in high school.” The latter is pretty much already true, and the former will be interesting without new tax revenue.

Below you have “No to fees in the public schools,” with a picture of an angry white man scolding a woman who only wants the best for her child:

And a related billboard proclaiming “No more fees in public schools: Truly free education.”

The end result is oddly populist to an American, but honestly no worse than the populist positive ads run by Republicans all the time. So what’s the problem? Two things.

First, the internet is unregulated. This is, I think, less of an issue than it sounds. In general, the internet is not a push medium, except for paid adverts, which are (or will be) regulated. Whispering campaigns are of course terrible, but I would need evidence to be persuaded that they are worse in the age of the internet: e.g., that they convince anyone who wasn’t already basically on-board.

Second, negative ads can convey real information. Patrick Corcoran argues this here. It makes sense that the truly scurrilous stuff will not convince a sophisticated electorate regardless of how it is disseminated, while real bad information may find it harder to be known. That said, I am not sure how this shakes out.

What I am sure of, however, is that the Green Party has no reason to exist other than as a subsidy-collecting machine, and is very far from Green. But that is a different issue.

The 2012 election in Mexico, early musings

 On Saturday there was a massive student march against the candidacy of Enrique Peña Nieto, the PRI candidate for the presidency of Mexico.

I have been asked more times than I can remember (by friends, family, and complete strangers, including taxi drivers and bartenders who are well-aware that I am a gringo) who I would vote for in the Mexican election. As with the United States, the answer is easy. I cannot vote for Andrés Manuel López Obrador for the simple reason of his reaction after the 2006 election.

So you cannot vote for the PRD in this election. If Ebrard were the candidate, things would be different, but he is not. AMLO, no f---ing way.

Then there is Mr. Peña Nieto. Uh. Erm. Uh-huh. Next post will discuss his campaign, which is actually somewhat amusing. I will even discuss the various positions on health policy. The problem is that I do not believe that he is not corrupt. Moreover, he is a member of a party that has not abandoned corruption. This is one of the few cases where my academic research and my heart push in the same direction: institutions matter more than policies, and regardless of policies, Enrique Peña Nieto and his party will not be good for the institutions.

Which leaves us with Josefina Vázquez Mota. Were I voting in the Mexican election, she would have my vote. With little enthusiasm, sadly. But she would have it. Am I wrong? I have PRD relatives, but they are not talking to me about the election. (Baseball yes, U.S. politics yes, Mexico no.) So help me out! Am I wrong? Who should an informed Mexican vote for? 

Mexico has changed!

 When I lived in Mexico, during the late 1990s, I often found myself arguing with people over the rate of cultural change in that country. It was blinding, even in those days before the internets and all that. And the pace has not slowed.

Evidence of change is not that the woman in the white dress handed out the order in which the presidential candidates were to speak. Evidence of change is that it was extremely controversial and prompted an apology by the organizers.

That said, wags could not help but declare her the winner of the debate. And having watched it, I can understand why. Plus, Enrique Peña Nieto is so far ahead that it does not really matter. As long as he does not throw up on himself, or confess to killing his ex-wife, then he is going to win. (For more on the ex-wife rumors, see here, or for a hella show go to minute 5:30 to see a state legislator cause a giant fuss after making the accusation on the floor of the Mexico state congress.)