In no Spanish electoral campaign had so many polls been published as in the one on 23-J. The vast majority anticipated a scenario in which an alliance of PP and Vox would obtain a majority and unseat the PSOE and Sumar coalition from power. But the mirage vanished with the scrutiny and, although the PP clearly won, it fell short of expectations and had no chance of governing. Many citizens had the feeling that the tsunami of surveys and tracking had failed miserably. It was like this?
To begin with, let's analyze the Ipsos survey for La Vanguardia, published on the first Sunday of the campaign. The most striking thing was that PP and Vox had a majority within their reach with up to 180 deputies, but the other end of the forks provided that the bloc on the right would remain at an insufficient 170 deputies and the one on the left would reach 152 (as finally has been, with a better result for the PSOE in votes than expected).
Carles Castro, an electoral analyst who collaborates in the interpretation and dissection of the polls for the readers of La Vanguardia, warned in his article that Sunday that despite the favorable scenario for the right, "a late reactivation of the leftist electorate could lead to a scenario conducive to the blockade” and without a majority of the conservative bloc. The authors of the poll themselves indicated in their report that "electoral alignments, far from being consolidated, are fluid and reactive, especially once the campaign begins."
After the results, Castro sees reaffirmed the decision of the newspaper's management to offer various scenarios in the form of forks, instead of a single fixed photo. "Faced with a scenario of great uncertainty, we chose to be prudent," he explains, despite the apparent "popular consensus" favorable to the right. The PP, Castro points out, was probably weighed down by the municipal and regional pacts with the extreme right and by a final campaign with strategic errors based on that expectation of a clear reversal. But the expected conservative wave finally activated many undecided voters on the left and deactivated a part of those on the right. In addition, this unforeseen outcome now makes it difficult for Feijóo to manage the result.
Prudence and proper management of expectations, both in politics and in the media, are usually good advisors.
