Polls show political sea change

Yeah, yeah, yeah --- those who are shown to be lagging behind always say that they don’t believe in polls. The Mireyista version of it, dutifully trotted out by the president’s hand-picked candidate José Miguel Alemán, goes “Our polls are of flesh and bone.”

However, there may be pavones circling overhead with an eye toward picking the flesh off of those bones.

On October 13 both La Prensa and El Panama America published polling supplements, the former’s based on surveys collected by LatiNetwork/Dichter & Neira, which is Latin America’s affiliate of the Harris Organization, the latter based on work by CID/Gallup, our regional Gallup pollsters. Dichter & Neira conducted its survey of 1,226 voters in all of the country except for the Darien and Kuna Yala between October 3 and 5 --- mostly before the October 5 revelation of the Supreme Court decision suppressing investigations of legislative bribery scandals had sparked a firestorm of civic protests. The CID/Gallup poll was taken among 1,212 adults across Panama between October 1 and 5, so was even less affected by the news of the high court’s decision. CID/Gallup claims a slightly lower margin of error than Dichter & Neira, but in any case the two organizations tend to ask slightly different versions of the same questions and usually get slightly different results.

The most publicized numbers were the respective pollsters’ snapshots of the presidential race, with La Prensa’s poll showing Martín Torrijos clinging to a narrow lead, 35.9 percent to Guillermo Endara’s 32, José Miguel Alemán’s 12.6 and Ricardo Martinelli’s 4. El Panama America had it Torrijos 41, Endara 35, Alemán 7 and Martinelli 4. Compared to previous surveys, both show a surge in support for Endara, mostly at Torrijos’s expense. Ominously for the Mireyistas, La Prensa’s pollsters found 40.1 percent of the electorate saying that they would definitely not vote for Alemán. Running behind Alemán in the negative ratings were Martinelli (28 percent), Torrijos (27.2) and Endara (17).

If one tries to put Panamanian politics onto a spectrum plotted out through a North American or European lens, errors are likely to result. Traditional notions of left and right taken from other places don’t necessarily work here. For example, the PRD is a member of the Social Democratic International --- something that’s generally considered left of center --- but was founded by a military dictatorship known for making some of its communist opponents disappear --- considered a right-wing phenomenon in most other places. On the other hand, Arnulfismo has its origins in a movement whose members used to dress up in Ku Klux Klan robes in the 1920s and which stripped all Panamanians of West Indian, Asian or Middle Eastern ancestry of their citizenship in the 1940s. That’s generally taken as evidence of a far right legacy, but Arnulfo Arias also championed women’s suffrage, created the Social Security Fund and was a pillar of opposition to militarism, all of which in other places might be taken as left-of-center positions. More recently, polls have shown that more than 85 percent of Panamanians opposed the US invasion of Iraq and more than 90 percent are against the privatization of our health care system. In the US such an antiwar stance coupled with support for socialized medicine is the hallmark of left-wing politics.

But guess notice how Panamanians place themselves and others on a left- right spectrum. CID/Gallup created a 1 to 7 scale, with 1 the far left of the spectrum, 7 the far right and 4 dead center, and asked Panamanians where they stood on that continuum. When averaged out, people in this country put themselves slightly right of center, at 4.2 on the spectrum. Meanwhile, despite the incessant allegation that fired Social Security director Juan Jované is a “leftist ideologue,” the average opinion put the professor exactly on the center of the spectrum at 4. It seems that most of the people who put Jované on the left end of the spectrum are Mireya Moscoso loyalists.

Using different techniques, CID/Gallup and Dichter & Neira leave different impressions about the president’s unpopularity. According to El Panama America’s pollster, 37 percent rate Mireya Moscoso’s job performance as “very bad,” with 17 percent giving her a “bad” grade, 34 with a neutral opinion, giving her “good” marks and only 3 percent saying that she has done a “very good” job. Even before the latest wave of scandals and protests, CID/Gallup found Mireya with the lowest approval rating in her administration. Dichter & Neira’s questions don’t include a neutral option, and show 24.4 percent of those surveyed rating Mireya’s performance as “very bad,” 43 percent “bad,” 26.8 percent “good” and 2.5 percent “excellent.” In either case it appears that the president is unpopular, but La Prensa’s survey suggests a Mireyista base of support that’s hard to find in the numbers published by El Panama America.

The presidential campaigns do their own opinion surveys, which they generally don’t generally publish, and there are also other less prestigious pollsters in competition with CID/Gallup and Dichter & Neira. Panama has laws designed to suppress the use of rigged polls as a campaign tactic, but it sometimes happens anyway. For their private purposes the candidates often use tracking polls, which show momentum in times of shifting public attitudes, and focus groups, which allow more sophisticated insights into the thinking of defined social segments.

We know what has been published, and it’s relatively easy to guess what some of the private research has been saying. Any way you want to add them up, the numbers indicate a sea change in the presidential campaign, to which we can see the candidates adjusting.

Also in this section:
Panama News Briefs
Cascading scandal envelopes all three government branches
Polls indicate political sea change
Torrijos shifts gears
On the campaign trail

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