Stumping Panama City in search of votes

Photo by the Velásquez mayoral campaign

Stumping Panama City in search of votes

They will tell you, depending on which campaign you ask, that the polls say it all, or say nothing at all. In a Panamanian election voters have tended to focus on local races in the last days before the election, so even with less than two months to go before Election Day this is early in the four-way Panama City mayoral race. There are all sorts of viewer or reader response "insty polls," but these are not random and measure the enthusiasm of supporters more than anything else. Miguel Antonio Bernal wins most of these. Such random polls as there have been have been taken on the basis of samples that are too small to be very precise, but they tend to show the PRD candidate Bobby Velásquez out front but slipping, Panameñista candidate Bosco Vallarino stagnant in second place, independent candidate Miguel Antonio Bernal in third place but moving up on Vallarino and Velásquez, and Vanguardia Moral candidate Miguel Batista fading into irrelevance.

There is not a lot of evidence of the Vallarino campaign on the ground. The strategy there seems to be a late media blitz and reliance on some opposition coat-tails in an expected Ricardo Martinelli romp over the ruling party's presidential candidate Balbina Herrera. There's also very little evidence of Batista, or Vanguardia Moral for that matter, on the ground.

Velásquez and Bernal, on the other hand, are fighting it out block by block over the length and breadth of the vast area that's Panama City. Above we see the PRD candidate looking for votes in Kuna Nega, while below the independent candidate presses the flesh in the housing projects of Villa Lorena.

Photo by the Bernal mayoral campaign

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