Message to the Venezuelan Opposition: Sorry, Suckers (Update: Uh, er, Chavez loses)

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez attends a campaign rally in the Andean state of Tachira November 28, 2007. (Ho-Miraflores Palace/Reuters)

By Justin Delacour

November 29, 2007

[Editor's Note: Well, when you live by the sword, you die by the sword, so I'm sure I'll be getting some well-deserved lickings in the comments section of this thread. So have at it, folks. I know, I'm the "sucker" now. I'll just take my lickings in silence. Oh, and one more thing. I was just informed tonight that the interview that Reuters published with Datanalisis director Luis Vicente Leon came from a couple months prior to the date they published the interview (November 28). So, as it turns out, Leon did not say Chavez would probably win 60-40 immediately after his firm had reported that the opposition was leading 49-39. This was Reuters' mistake for not clarifying that the interview had taken place some two months prior to Reuters' publication of it. Nevertheless, I take full responsibility for my own mistaken projection here. So go ahead, folks, have at it.]

Anyone who knows anything about Venezuelan polling knows that the pollster Germán Campos does not mess around. Every electoral projection I've seen from him has proven accurate. In fact, of all his electoral projections that I've seen, none has overestimated Chavez's margin of victory.

Unlike the rest of Venezuela's pollsters, Campos understands the basic principle that partisan politics and political polling do not mix. (As you might have recognized by now, I could never get into the business of polling because I wear my politics on my sleeve, just as Venezuela's opposition pollsters do).

If Campos has the "Yes" campaign up by 16 points among likely voters, you can pretty much rest assured that "No" is going down.

The problem right now is that a number of openly opposition pollsters appear to be cooking their numbers in favor of the "No" campaign so as to either increase opposition turnout in the Sunday referendum or to lay the groundwork for claims of "fraud" in the aftermath of another impending defeat. For some time, the concern among the opposition pollsters has been that some in the opposition's ranks would abstain from the vote. Thus, the strategy of the opposition pollsters is to fluff their numbers at the last minute so as to either boost morale among their ranks (and thereby boost their side's turnout) or to lay the groundwork for claims of "fraud." We can get a glimpse of what's happening by contrasting Datanalisis' cooked numbers with what the firm's director actually says about the probable outcome of the vote.

Of course, not all the opposition pollsters would be employing such an unethical strategy if Chavez's advantage were as great as it was in, say, the 2006 presidential race. Some opposition pollsters are doing this because they think they can make it a close race and thereby boost the opposition's long-term political prospects in the process. Indeed, Chavez's side will not win by as large of a margin as he did in the 2006 presidential election. (Chavez won 63 percent of the vote in that election).

Nevertheless, in all likelihood, Chavez's side will win. For the most part, Chavistas will not cross over to the other side in a vote on the constitutional reforms because the base of the "No" campaign is much more repellent to most Chavistas than whatever problems some might see in the reforms.

Moreover, the opposition needs to learn some basic math. As Bloomberg recently reported, Venezuela has now undergone fifteen straight quarters of robust economic expansion. I doubt very seriously that any Latin American population would vote against a sitting government that has overseen fifteen straight quarters of robust economic expansion. Amidst such propitious socio-economic conditions, governments don't lose political fights.