Mexican elections 2018

Max:

The best case scenario is that López Obrador listens to the rational side of his team, not to the loonies.
One good thing about yesterday's speech is that he warned his own people about corruption. He'll got after then first of all. Many of the Morena people who won elections yesterday are not precisely the most honest you can find.

As for Trump, I personally believe they'll get along much better than Trump and Peña Nieto.
Peña Nieto is a stiff politician, surrounded by stiff technocrats; Trump loathes that. López Obrador is a more relaxed type. He also loathes the Mexican equivalent of "Washington". They both have old-fashioned economic ideas and both think they are new (AMLO is actually looking for something like the Alliance for Progress, the cold war American scheme to "help" Latin America). They both see themselves as saviors of the Nation.

The drug war, I dunno. That's the part I really don't know. In 2012 I thought it couldn't get any worse, but it did. I don't want to be too optimistic.
Legalization is part of the way out, I think.

A curious thing is about to happen:

Both PES (the right-wing Evangelical party allied to AMLO) and New Alliance (the teachers' union party allied to Meade) are not reaching the threshold of 3% of the valid votes to retain their registry as national parties.
This means they will not get representatives or senators by the parties lists, will not get any public funding and will not be able to participate in the next Federal elections (unless the new majority changes the electoral law).

Oddly enough, PES with only 2.4% of the vote, will anyway get more than 50 representatives, voted in districts under the banner of the Morena coalition. AMLO did a disastrous negotiation: he expected to win by a narrower margin and also expected PES to give him more votes.

Interesting. The rise of disruptive populists appears to be a spreading phenomenon on multiple continents.

49% of the members in the Deputies Chamber (representatives) are women. That is 246 out of 500.

More than half of the Senators elected (65 out of 128) are women.

There's a law that half of all parties candidacies must be for women, and half for men.
Until now, many parties saved most of womens' candidacies for the districts they knew it would be very hard to win.
Not anymore.

I wish we had that law in the US. I started voting for women candidates when they first started appearing on our ballots. When I worked in management, I always considered women as equal candidates for jobs. I learned from personal experience being of Japanese ancestry. My first job was working for Florsheim Shoe Company as a Field Auditor. They promoted me to Audit Manager after 3.5 years with the company. It was a time when not many Asians worked in management positions in this country. I was also aware of the glass ceiling for women, and did all I could to provide them with equal opportnity. I have also tried to vote for women candidates in local and state elections.

Started a mini-study on class and vote in Mexico City.

There's, as usual, a positive correlation between earnings and vote for PAN (for Anaya), and a negative correlation between vote earnings and vote for AMLO.

The new things:
Until now, PRI would win outright in the poshest neighborhoods. Not this time. Anaya won handily (65%). Not even the rich voted PRI.

And more importantly:
The earnings-vote correlation didn't work as well for the city candidates.
The line for Barrales and Sheinbaum tends to be flatter.
Many upper-middle and affluent voters who voted for Anaya in the President ballot, turned to Mikel Arriola or Sheinbaum in the city ballot.
Many working and lower classe voters who voted for AMLO in the President ballot, turned to Barrales in the city ballot.

Arriola's campaign was to move PRI to the right, to woo the most conservatives and class conscious PAN voters away from Barrales (a former stewardess and union leader).
Barrales campaign didn't try to attract voters from the right side of the Front. Even her billboard propaganda was written in popular city slang. And she promised all sort of giveaways.
Sheinbaum's campaign was more about innovation, stressing her academic credentials.

Mikel Arriola ended up getting 100 000 more votes than Meade.
Alejandra Barrales ended up getting 300 000 more votes than Anaya
Claudia Sheinbaum ended up getting 400 000 less votes than AMLO

Still, Sheinbaum won handily: 47% against Barrales' 31% and Arriola's 13%.

(My man Rascón got only 2% and the Humanist Party will lose its local registry)

What do you think about the result fbaezer?

It was expected.
I'm not jubilant about it. I find it worrisome that we'll end up with a President who is adored by millions, has control of both chambers of Congress and an opposition who is dismantling already (both social and political).
It's like going back to the old PRI times of my youth, only with a different party. Mexico will depend too much on a single person's decisions (or his will and whims).

All this said, I'm happy that PRI got its comeuppance, finally.
I'm glad, specially, that those insensible, callous, self-proclaimed Owners of the Economic Truth are on their way out.

Thank you

Can you help me understand this, please?


"and an opposition who is dismantling already (both social and political). "

Any thoughts about how the way Mexico handles Trump will change?

I loved the Fox wall video!

Political opposition:
PRI is on shambles, many will defect to Morena. The same with PRD.
Citizens' Movement is too small, and is more of a regional than national party, perhaps part of PRD will end up there.
PAN will first live a hard and heated dispute for power. The right side of the party will probably win, ousting Anaya, and they'll become what they were in the 70s, the party of the conservative middle class.

Social opposition:
The very same businessmen who campaigned against AMLO a week ago have made a video supporting him. The wallet comes first.
The media will be careful, at least at the beginning. A couple extreme-right heads have already fallen, a third might soon,
Social media is practically taken by elated AMLO supporters, who applaud the exact same things they critisized before the elections.
What's left? Human rights organizations, indigenous organizations, a few pundits, anti-violence organizations, all usually disconnected between each other,

A friend put it this way: "We have moved back to the 70s, but now we have gyps (ailments).

Unlike what Americans think, Trump was hardly a factor in the campaign. There is consensus about him.
The main difference is that Peña Nieto is unpopular and AMLO is popular. AMLO has a better leverage in negotiating with the US.

An American election style map of AMLO's landslide.



States won by López Obrador in red, Anaya in blue.

Nuevo León, the industrial state in the Northeast was barely won by AMLO.
The big regional shift is the Nortwest, who never voted AMLO when in the PRD and now became a bastion of Morena, even more than Mexico City and as much the South.

Ah, thank you.

I expected dismantling to have an object other than the opposition.

Any ideas on what they might do, having better leverage?

It's a mystery for me.
We'll find out this week, when AMLO meets Pompeo, Mnuchin, Kuchner and the like.

Here's your answer.

The so-called leftist wrote a letter to Trump, but forgot to write about Mexicans in the US.

https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/amlo-calls-for-completion-of-nafta-talks/

Hmmmmmmmm

Appeasement?