Two polls by private firms in Venezuela conclude that opposition presidential candidate Edmundo González Urrutia is the favorite of voters, with at least a 25-point lead over President Nicolás Maduro, just 10 days before the vote, scheduled for Sunday, July 28.
One of the studies, by the firm Delphos, in alliance with the Center for Political and Government Studies of the Andrés Bello Catholic University (UCAB), shows the opposition candidate with 59.1% of voting intention. Maduro follows with 24.6%, while Benjamín Rausseo, comedian and businessman, is third with 1.4%, and politician Antonio Ecarri, from the Lápiz party, is in fourth position with 1%.
In this survey, which confirms González Urrutia’s lead and was released on Wednesday, 1,200 voter interviews were conducted and has a 1.8% margin of error.
80.6% of those interviewed said they were sure they would vote on Sunday, 28th of this month. 12% said they might vote and 6.5% said they were unlikely to vote.
According to Delphos and the UCAB research center, approximately 9.1 million voters have a high or moderately high probability of voting. In addition to them, there would be an estimated 4 million voters with a moderate probability of participation. This would mean a ceiling of 13.1 million voters, that is, 61.5% of the electoral roll.
From this universe of potential voters, Delphos and the UCAB center envision three scenarios where González Urrutia has a minimum difference of 2 million votes over Maduro, and a maximum of 4.4 million votes ahead, with high participation.
Analyst Félix Seijas Jr., who presented the survey in Caracas, highlighted that 71.3% of the sample thinks that a change of government is necessary or very necessary and that 40% defined themselves as opposition, 30.6% as Chavistas and 29.5% said they do not support any side.
See the survey results here
On the road to transition?
For his part, Benigno Alarcón Deza, director of the Center for Political Studies at UCAB, said that “the conditions are in place” for a political transition in the country and considered the probability of the vote being suspended or the opposition candidate or one of his electoral cards being disqualified, at this stage of the process, to be low.
All the scenarios analysed in the study translate into a “gap” of between 20 and 30 percentage points in favour of the opposition, he said.
“That depends on the number of people who are going to vote. The projections tell us that the participation will be very high,” an ideal scenario for the opposition because the gap would be “bigger,” said Alarcón Deza.
Government spokesmen have dismissed the polls that project an opposition victory and have suggested that they will use them as an argument to claim fraud on election day.
Experts have warned about the existence of pollsters with little track record and dubious reliability that give Maduro the win by more than 50 points.
This week, Maduro reiterated his allegations of alleged opposition plans to create chaos after the vote on the 28th of this month and ignore its results. The alleged plot would include electrical “sabotage” to “change” the popular vote.
Hope grows
Also on Wednesday, the company ORC Consultores presented a study carried out from July 5 to 13, which determined that González Urrutia, a diplomat nominated by anti-Chavez supporters as a plan B in the face of the impossibility of registering María Corina Machado and another substitute candidate, has 59.68% of voting intention, while Maduro enjoys 12.59% of electoral support.
This is the highest ceiling of voting intention in favour of the opposition candidate in ORC’s surveys since April this year. The preference in his favour was 8 points lower in May (51.77%), days after he was confirmed as the candidate of the Unitary Platform.
The poll, with a sampling error of 2.5% and a 95% confidence level, states that 69% of the 1,205 voters interviewed are hopeful about the outcome of the vote and 23% are hopeless – this hopelessness was 33% last March.
Seven out of 10 are willing to vote, according to the study.
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