Saturday, May 22, 2010

Colombia's President Election: Final surveys and opinion polls before the vote

Today May 22nd marks the end of publication of any opinion poll or survey into next week's presidential election vote, so naturally the main opinion pollsters were keen to get out their final surveys before the blackout deadline. Here are the results of the four big pollsters in Colombia:

The first round has the two frontrunners Santos and Mockus looking like this:
The four polling groups are Gallup Colombia (a fair reputation), CNC (there's a suspicion of Uribe bias in this company's numbers, but let's see how their numbers compare to reality first), University of MedellĂ­n (a company that tends to mix in more data from rural areas than others) and Datexco (also a fair reputation).

The main takeaway from these numbers is that, as we and everyone else has predicted for weeks, it's very unlikely that any single candidate gets 50% +1 vote in round one. This means we're going to see a runoff between Santos and Mockus (bar some very big upset) and so here's what voter intention looks like in round two:


It's gonna be close, people. So now we have a nice comparative of the pollster companies, it only remains to see how the vote turns out and then we can gauge their accuracy. The data for the charts was collected from this report.