Bolivian Polling Games

This morning’s Cochabamba daily, Los Tiempos, chose as its big lead article almost a full page of coverage of a new public opinion poll showing Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga with a commanding lead of 10% over Evo Morales [Quiroga 27%, Doria Medina 20%, Morales 17%]. Of course, one minor problem with the poll is that it completely excludes voters outside of Bolivia’s cities. To the paper’s credit, it did, at least, prominently disclose that fact.

Now, regardless of what one thinks of these candidates, polling is polling. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist or a political scientist to understand that a poll like this is, well, just plain goofy. Such silliness. Imagine if you had seen this headline a year ago in the US: A new poll today showed Senator John Kerry with a commanding ten point lead over President George Bush. The poll was taken among voters in downtown Berkeley.

Reliable, scientific polling is based on representative sampling. Why on earth would any credible political scientist do a Bolivian poll and pretend that results from the city alone have validity whatsoever? Why would a respectable newspaper like Los Tiempos use the poll as its lead story?

It may be that the paper is just hungry for some election news to draw attention to its front page. More conspiratorially, maybe the paper’s owners are trying to help Quiroga develop an image of momentum.

In either case, polls like this are only likely to come back and haunt Quiroga later. What happens in October when someone actually produces a poll that includes both the cities and the rural areas (where Morales’ base and support is much, much stronger)? Suddenly the numbers are going to look wildly different and, like it or not, Los Tiempos is going to get stuck with a story showing a Morales surge, when in fact all that really happened is they used a representative sampling.

If polling like this is part of some Quiroga strategy, it may turnout to be as smart as the move by the US Ambassador in 2002, when he warned voters not to support Morales and the MAS and damn near propelled him to first place.

Such is the wild world of Bolivian politics readers.