I was wondering whether to analyze the electoral results of last Sunday. After all, there is a fraud. But then again, I've never taken CNE results truly at face value and only found their worth in indicating trends away from chavismo, stuff that even manipulated data cannot hide. So I have decided to make only two posts, this is the first one, retaking my poster community, Caucagüita.
I have chosen this district inside Sucre, the big district of Eastern Caracas, around Petare, dominated by what is perhaps the single biggest "favela" of South America. Caucagüita was made noteworthy when it was a mere squatter settlement in the campaign that elected Luis Herrera Campins in 1978, where he had one of the most remembered political ads ever (with Aleida Josefina). Things have changed a little bit now, a highway goes through it and a few high rises have been built. Still, this is an area where chavismo should NEVER get less than 3/4 of the votes cast, and this in a very bad day. I know, I already wrote all of this but I am saving you time here. You are welcome.
Well, if you look at the graph below you certainly can understand why chavismo is getting really, really nervous.
If you graph all the results since 2004, and include the best ones when there is to chose between governor or mayor (2004 and 2008), you can observe the following:
In blue the total votes of the opposition is ALWAYS growing. And when it falls, so do fall badly the chavismo vote. The blue line is thus quite steadier than the red line.
Chavismo always wins, which is to be expected, but its vote is erratic and always drops when Chavez is not directly on the ballot.
But the story is in the purple line which is the percentile the opposition gets. Its low is on October 2004, in the post recall election funk. Then it was around 25%, the maximum it should get in Caucagüita. The surpise is that since that result, the percentile has tended to grow when one would have expected that Misiones would have secured that district. Last Sunday, not only Capriles recovered the October 2012 result but Maduro failed to recover the Chavez one. The trend line is now apparently in an unstoppable way to reach 45%, which for chavismo is simply a disaster that a popular sector can abandon it that way.
This graph, look at it carefully, is the best example on how the opposition has an increasing appeal to the lower classes that are getting tired of been taken for granted by the regime, lower classes which are starting to sense the client role chavismo wants to perpetuate on them. And it is not to their liking.
I have chosen this district inside Sucre, the big district of Eastern Caracas, around Petare, dominated by what is perhaps the single biggest "favela" of South America. Caucagüita was made noteworthy when it was a mere squatter settlement in the campaign that elected Luis Herrera Campins in 1978, where he had one of the most remembered political ads ever (with Aleida Josefina). Things have changed a little bit now, a highway goes through it and a few high rises have been built. Still, this is an area where chavismo should NEVER get less than 3/4 of the votes cast, and this in a very bad day. I know, I already wrote all of this but I am saving you time here. You are welcome.
Well, if you look at the graph below you certainly can understand why chavismo is getting really, really nervous.
 | ||
| Sorry, my Excel is in Spanish. And I do not want to put the date of the election because it overburdens the graph. In purple light the trend line for the deeper purple of opposition percentile. |
If you graph all the results since 2004, and include the best ones when there is to chose between governor or mayor (2004 and 2008), you can observe the following:
In blue the total votes of the opposition is ALWAYS growing. And when it falls, so do fall badly the chavismo vote. The blue line is thus quite steadier than the red line.
Chavismo always wins, which is to be expected, but its vote is erratic and always drops when Chavez is not directly on the ballot.
But the story is in the purple line which is the percentile the opposition gets. Its low is on October 2004, in the post recall election funk. Then it was around 25%, the maximum it should get in Caucagüita. The surpise is that since that result, the percentile has tended to grow when one would have expected that Misiones would have secured that district. Last Sunday, not only Capriles recovered the October 2012 result but Maduro failed to recover the Chavez one. The trend line is now apparently in an unstoppable way to reach 45%, which for chavismo is simply a disaster that a popular sector can abandon it that way.
This graph, look at it carefully, is the best example on how the opposition has an increasing appeal to the lower classes that are getting tired of been taken for granted by the regime, lower classes which are starting to sense the client role chavismo wants to perpetuate on them. And it is not to their liking.