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    • Observers for political parties at a Mexican election. (AP)

    Observers for political parties at a Mexican election. (AP)

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    LatAm in Focus: A Pre-Midterm Pulse Check on the Mexican Electorate

    By Carin Zissis

    Can President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s governing coalition keep its supermajority in the Chamber of Deputies? El Financiero’s Alejandro Moreno tells us what the polls indicate.

    He also says that Morena’s supporters are made up increasingly of rural voters with lower education levels who previously backed the once-mighty Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). “2018 was more like a rare manifestation of the vote rather than a realignment for the future,” notes Moreno, who points out that both rural and urban middle class voters—two groups that in the past diverged—came together for AMLO in that vote. Now he says: “Things seem to be going back to how they were before.”

    "Polls offer this opportunity to have an X-ray of the electorate."

    But some aspects of this election are new, and one example is the heightened divisions. “We haven't seen this level of political polarization in the country that I can remember [since I started doing] polls in Mexico,” says Moreno, who is also a political scientist at the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology, or ITAM. Why? Voters are less attached to major political parties, which is coupled, he says, with “the president following—for good or bad, I'm not going to judge, just to describe—a polarizing strategy.” Meanwhile, parties that in the past were what Moreno describes as “historical adversaries” have formed alliances in this election to take on the governing party. “Now it's everyone against Morena and its allies.”

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    Katie Hopkins produced this episode. The music in this podcast was performed at Americas Society in New York. Learn more about upcoming concerts at musicoftheamericas.org.

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