The machine to elect the future president of Mexico in 2024 has already started. The popularity of the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and the little or no strength of the opposition seem to tilt the balance of the country's future towards the continuation of what is known in presidential jargon as the Fourth Transformation ( 4Q). In the race to succeed López Obrador in the candidacy of Morena, his party, two names stand out, Claudia Sheinbaum and Marcelo Ebrard.
Morena's hegemony is so great that the contest to elect the future president will not be on July 2, 2024, but earlier, in the fight for the candidacy of this party. Hence the importance of the existing polls, which allow the electoral strategy of the contenders to be fine-tuned.
La Vanguardia has had access to the first surveys of Covarrubias y Associados, which anticipate those Morena will do in the coming weeks. Covarrubias y Asociados is one of the demoscopic companies with the most tradition in Mexico. In the 2006 presidential elections, he worked for President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in a very closed electoral process that, for Obrador and his followers, ended in electoral fraud. It was Obrador's first choice. There was a second one and, finally, in the third one, in 2012, it swept away.
Morena's strength in Mexican politics is so great that in the Covarrubias y Asociados survey the party wins in all the scenarios proposed. The study was conducted between April 19 and 25, 2023, and the sample size was 1,500 people, visited in person.
In the survey, Morena appears as the main preference of the interviewees, with 47% approval. Its closest competitor, the National Action Party (PAN), only has 13% of support, followed by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) with a scant 11%. In the hypothesis of future political alliances, a candidacy of Morena, the Green Party and the Labor Party captures 52% of the preferences, with a resounding 52%. The alliance between the PAN, the PRI and the PRD would only get 24%.
If Morena's presidential candidate were Claudia Sheinbaum (current head of government in Mexico City), the party would get 57% of the vote. If the candidate were Marcelo Ebrard (Secretary of Foreign Relations of Mexico), polls give him a vote intention of 55%. A third scenario proposed by the survey company, the candidacy of Adán Augusto López (current Secretary of Government) would obtain 48% of the intention to vote. In all three cases Morena overcomes his political opponents.
The figures corroborate the extremely high popularity of President López Obrador – 80% approval at the end of his six-year term, something never seen before in Mexico – and the disarticulation of the opposition, in which his most well-positioned figure is a dead man! Indeed, many people prefer Luis Donaldo Colosio over any other opposition candidate, but not because of the work done by the young mayor of the city of Monterrey, but because of the memory of his father, murdered in 1994 and still alive in the collective memory, thanks mostly to a Netflix series.
Also according to the Covarrubias y Asociados survey, President López Obrador gets a rating of 8.05 on a scale from 1 to 10.
The polls indicate a clear advantage for Claudia Sheinbaum, and on the rise, as can be verified on the SDPNoticias.com portal, which updates an average of the polls carried out.
Sheinbaum is a scientist with many years of militancy in left-wing movements who took her first steps in politics in student protests when she was studying physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
Second place in all the polls is occupied by Marcelo Ebrard, a professional politician from a young age, trained in the PRI, where he went on to hold institutional positions, a party he eventually left to join the military on the left. Despite the fact that Ebrard is better known than Sheinbaum, she surpasses him on all attributes, especially on the question of who prefers citizenship for Morena's candidacy.
The survey by Covarrubias y Asociados indicates Claudia Sheinbaum as the favorite to represent Morena in the contest for the presidency of Mexico, as she gets 30% of the vote. In second place is Marcelo Ebrard, with 20% of the preference, so that these ten percentage points start to weigh.
One of Claudia Sheinbaum's main advisers is the Barcelona-based political consultant Antonio Gutiérrez Rubí, who gained fame in Mexico when another of his clients, left-wing politician Gustavo Petro, won the presidency of Colombia. The truth is that Sheinbaum's competitors, within Morena itself and in the opposition, are exploring consulting options in Catalonia, especially for social media strategy.
Ariadna Domingo, a 23-year-old specializing in Instagram, where she has 400,000 followers, is one of the most sought-after professionals in the sector. Domingo would have designed a method to try to stand out in the very complex and excessively competitive world of social networks. When asked if he has been approached by Mexican politicians, Domingo did not deny it, but preferred to keep the information private.
