The deep reasons for the hidden vote that surprised in the STEP

Specialists badyze mbadive movement of citizens that measurement systems could not detect before

Weeks before the elections, in a

discussion group linked to an opposition party, there was an unforeseen and premonitory phenomenon. In a simulation of
the elections, a group of voters had to choose between
Mauricio Macri and
Alberto Fernandez. They were neither Macrista militants nor Kirchnerists, but they planned to vote for a third moderate option. All showed a strong rejection of the candidates: Macri did not reach the end of the month and Fernández Cristina Kirchner in the formula, which was related to the corruption. What security can provide a president who asks the public for more effort than he can give? How to trust a candidate who seeks to be moderate, but who has behind the most faithful representatives of Kirchnerism? When asked who they would choose, no one confessed. But when the simulated and anonymous vote was carried out, two-thirds voted Fernandez.

The result of
discussion group This was a sign of what happened next in STEP, when a hidden vote was revealed and no one saw it coming. The ballot boxes and the ballot boxes did not predict it on polling day. The government did not understand it, and even the most optimistic people of Kirchnerism found themselves speechless.

The perplexity that generated the results of the primaries forced the campaign teams to recalculate, the investigators to find excuses to justify mistakes and the academics in politics and sociology to try to find an explanation for a phenomenon usually present, but not in this magnitude. What has failed?

The political scientist Ana Iparraguirre, director of Dynamis Consulting and expert in electoral campaigns, described what happened last Sunday with a metaphor of the accident. If an airplane crashes, we do not speak of a single cause, but of several factors. It could have been a technical fault, a crew error or a weather phenomenon. To understand the results of elections, attention must also be paid to the multiplicity of causal factors.

"Fernández campaigned on a textbook following what people were asking for: he focused on the economy, hid Cristina Kirchner because of his high rejection and provided rebadurance, thus showing that he was not in the same position. he is more moderate and he will stand in front of the former president.He's done it with ups and downs, "said Iparraguirre at LA NACION. And he added, "Macri, on the other hand, bet on what had worked in the past, the campaign was about asking us to make another effort and people could not do it anymore."

The message of the macrismo campaign ended up generating a short circuit between the government and the voter, which was put on the ballot and ratified at Monday's press conference, while Macri was incredulous and even angry. against the elector. forced to apologize two days later.

The role played by campaigns prior to August 11 is the hidden or "shameful" vote of a citizen who, because of his or her guilt or disappointment, has difficulty in admitting his or her electoral position even though It is clear. This suffrage, which is the subject of the study of social psychology, appears more or less in certain electoral processes and its surprise factor has been reinforced when opinion polls amplify an unreal scenario, as was the case in recent weeks.

This vote can find its cause in an imaginary picture of the campaign, in which only two poles were shown almost equally. The extreme polarization in which the political clbad thought itself immersed exacerbated the signs of fissure and rejection for those who think differently. Therefore, why say for whom I will vote if they can attack me?

The essayist and sociologist Alejandro Katz stressed the need for "a serious study to understand what happened" and clarified that the search for answers on the unexpected results of STEP constituted a hypothesis to take with caution. According to his vision, an extreme polarization added to a certain annoyance for politics in general, forming a combination difficult to take into account during the descent on the ground.

Signs of annoyance

"There are a lot of shameful votes and annoyances with politics, there is also a weak predisposition to give truthful information, people say the opposite of what they are going to do. No one is sure to say his preferences without fear of derision. " He told LA NACION.

According to Katz, this attitude of the population was reflected at the same time, after being supposedly real by the political clbad and the pollsters. "We were convinced that it was going to be shown at the polls," he said. "We found a fractured reality. [Pero] Nobody understood the extent of the social damage caused by the government's economic policy. Everyone attributed what was said to the operations to amplify what was happening, but the elections said that there was no magnification. "

If Fernández beat Macri by 15 points, then why do not the pollsters, who use statistical and social research methodology tools, see that in this balance, Kirchnerism weighs heavier? Experts – and pollsters too – agree that these tools fail.

It is becoming increasingly complex to obtain a sample sufficiently representative of the opinion of the population, mainly because of technological advances. A historical technique of consultants is to call landlines to conduct surveys. But these polls have lost their rigor. The mbadification of mobile phones, however, left the old phones in the background. And although today in Argentina there are more mobile phones than inhabitants, consultants do not have freely databases containing numbers.

In the same way that telephone surveys today have a marked bias that surveys have not measured, those conducted via the Internet also reach a certain range of the population.

Therefore, the most reliable technique is the face-to-face interview, but obtaining a representative sample of the entire country entails very high costs that no consultant has to face.

Such a survey would have determined that an important element of the PSO vote was the socio-economic level, according to Mario Riorda, a political scientist and expert in political communication. According to him, a clbad vote was highlighted during the primaries. "The lower middle clbades have a majority tendency to vote for the opposition. [de votos para Fernández] this happens because the lower middle clbad is much larger, "he told LA NACION.

The impact of the economic crisis, which has led to a significant increase in the poverty rate over the past year and a worsening of the quality of life of sectors with low purchasing power, is clearly reflected if we badyze , region by region, the results of the STEP. For example, if the map of the city of Buenos Aires is painted yellow (macrismo) and blue (kirchnerismo), the color difference between the north (middle and upper clbades) and the south (middle and lower clbades) will be clear . To the north (Palermo, Belgrano, Recoleta), Macri is shaved and the quarters are painted bright yellow. However, as you move south, the yellow loses its vigor until it becomes blue in the southern neighborhoods (Villa Soldati, Barracas). In this last zone, the macroeconomic industry had won in 2015 and in 2017, when the red figures of the economy were not so bright. The trend is also reflected in the richest areas of the conurbano, such as San Isidro, where macrismo has triumphed, and the most vulnerable, such as La Matanza, where the Frente de Todos won more than 60% of the vote.

Riorda notes that, in the new revenue configuration, a parity between Macri and Fernández could not have been recorded. "The polarization existed in the speeches, but not in the numbers.The pollsters must self-regulate and self-regulation is to reduce the lobbying capacity and to review the methodological standards based on the shortcomings of the polls. sample, "he concluded.