electoral paradoxes. The extrapolation to Spain of the resounding victory of the Andalusian PP would not guarantee its leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the majority necessary to govern. The reasons are several, but the main one is that the dazzling 60% of the votes that the center and the right obtained on June 19 in Andalusia hides absolute figures that are not very different from those already harvested by PP, Vox and Ciudadanos. in the last general elections of 2019 (which the left won).
Of course, if the comparison is made between the regional elections of 2018 and those of 2022, the conservative bloc achieves a net gain of more than 350,000 votes. And since the participation in absolute figures was similar in both elections (3,700,000 voters), the inevitable interpretation is that the left not only abstained more on 19-J but that a part of it opted for the PP and even for Vox ( which added almost 100,000 ballots to the result four years ago).
The retreat of the PSOE in the regional scenario (of almost 130,000 votes) allows this interpretation, which fits with the transfers to the PP (of one in ten socialist voters in 2018) that the polls detected. Even so, there would be more than 200,000 conservative ballots whose origin would remain unknown. They could come from the left, which gave up a total of almost 300,000 votes compared to 2018, but it does not seem likely that the orphan votes of the space that Por Andalucía and Adelante Andalucía had been occupying now supported the PP or Vox.
The other possibility would be through a substitution mechanism. In other words, the transfer from the PSOE to the PP would have been greater than suggested by the absolute losses of the Socialists, since the latter would also have benefited from a vote transfer from the space of the alternative left (which the polls would also confirm, although in an insufficient magnitude to cover the gains of the center and the right). From there, another interpretation is possible, also based on a substitution mechanism, although in this case with an “inverse” sign.
In other words, there could also be the possibility (which the polls do not deny in light of the different degree of mobilization exhibited by each bloc) that most of the losses of the left led to abstention and were replaced by voters from the center and the right. who did not vote in 2018 but who now, motivated by an expectation of victory, would have gone to the polls. After all, beyond the reorganization of the vote that the conservative space has suffered (with the rise of the PP at the expense of Cs and the consolidation of Vox), the number of ballots that the center parties gathered on 19-J and right is similar to the total count that they already garnered in the April 2019 elections (almost 2,200,000).
If, on the other hand, the comparison is made with the general elections of November 2019, the conservative space would now have added more than 100,000 ballots, which would coincide with the losses of the PSOE and with that 10% transfer that reflects both the field surveys Andalusian as state. In short, if we start from the figures of the 2019 legislative elections in Andalusia, the PP would have won 65% of the voters of Cs and, attention, with 43% of those of Vox. And if all these transfers were applied to the state results of the last legislative elections, the popular ones could aspire to gather more than eight million votes.
The problem with this calculation is that it would leave Vox with less than 9% of the vote (although it exceeded 10% in April 2019 and 15% in November of the same year), which would collide with the growth of almost 100,000 ballots. that the ultras have registered between 2018 and 2022. Therefore, if this upward evolution is contemplated when encrypting the eventual transfer of voters from Vox to the popular ones, the PP vote range in a participation scenario such as that of 2019 would move between 30% and 35%.
And the left? With some losses, in the appointment of 19-J, that exceed 700,000 votes with respect to the 2019 generals, his vote draws a flat encephalogram. But that brain death was also deduced from its regional result of 2018 and, however, five months later the left raised 600,000 votes of abstention to defeat the center and the right in seats in Andalusia (as in the whole of Spain), in April and November 2019.
For this reason, discounting the transfers from the PSOE to the PP and the fall in the mobilization of the alternative left, Pedro Sánchez (with 26% of the vote) and Yolanda Díaz (with 12%) could still aspire to gather more than nine million votes in general elections, far from the 11 million that Socialists and Podemos added in April 2019, but not so much from the more than ten that they gathered, with Más País, in November. And although that correlation would leave the left at an abysmal distance from the absolute majority, it would not allow PP and Vox to go beyond 170 deputies either. Like Rajoy and Rivera in 2016.
