This Sunday, July 28, Venezuelans will head to the polls in what has been framed as the opposition’s best chance to unseat President Nicolás Maduro, who has been in office since 2013. From the media coverage, one comes away with the impression of only two options: an opposition win,or massive pro-Maduro fraud.
There are many pollsters in Venezuela, and indeed most have shown opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia with a clear advantage. There are eight other candidates running, though none appear to have significant support. González is “leading the race with support from more than 50 percent of respondents in several polls,” theNew York Times reportedlast week. Polls show he “would easily win the vote,”according to the Wall Street Journal.
They aren’t wrong. But it’s possible the pollsters are.
As Venezuelan economist (and CEPR Senior Research Fellow) Francisco Rodríguezrecently noted on X(formerly Twitter), an average of the polls conducted ahead of the July 28 vote show González with a 28.9 percentage point advantage over Maduro. But, he continued, after correcting for polling bias, that lead largely evaporates. Since 2015, pollsters have overestimated opposition support by an average of 29.5 percentage points, he found.
Rodríguez corrected for polling bias in three different ways — based on the average bias from 2004 to 2021, the average bias from 2017 to 2021, and based on an overall average that gave greater weight to polls in more recent years. He also adjusted the numbers by giving a relatively greater weight to pollsters with greater historical precision. The results show a range of outcomes, from a 9.5 percentage point advantage for González to an 8.1 percentage point advantage for Maduro.
“Rather than providing a precise projection, what these estimates show is the profound uncertainty we may have today about the electoral outcome given how inadequate polls have been as predictors of results in the recent past,” Rodríguezwrote.
The economist noted some potential explanations for the systematic overestimation of opposition support by pollsters. First, the bias could be caused by opposition abstention. If so, thenRodríguez notesthat “in an environment of high mobilization and opposition unity, the bias will be reduced and the results will be close to those shown by the surveys.” But the level of migration from Venezuela may also affect the weights that pollsters use, which arebased on older census data. If relatively more people have migrated from more pro-opposition geographical areas, this could explain the errors. Another explanation is that the vote itself is neither free nor fair.
Certainly much of the coverage ahead of this weekend’s vote has focused on the unfair playing field — with Maduroutilizing state resources,limiting independent news coverage, and the governmentthrowing roadblocks in the opposition’s path, most notably through the rejection of multiple opposition candidates’ participation in the vote.
But there has been relatively little attention given to another way in which the electoral playing field has been badly skewed: US sanctions.
It is of course true that Venezuela’s economic decline (a record setting collapse of more than 70 percent in per capita GDP since 2012) began prior to the imposition of US sanctions. However, according to calculations by Rodríguez,more than half of that decline“can be explained as a result of sanctions and other politically induced restrictions such as the withdrawal of government recognition.” Setting aside theillegalityandtens of thousandsof Venezuelan deaths, or more, caused by the sanctions — as CEPR and Rodríguezhave documented— US sanctions have destabilized the electoral landscape in two key ways.
First, economic performance is a crucial issue for voters. It is impossible to legitimately deny that those sanctions, and the resulting economic hardship, have undermined overall levels of support for Maduro and his government. The second is potentially even greater. The sanctions are like a gun pointed at the head of the electorate.
The US partially lifted some sanctions late last year as part of anagreement meant to ensure “free and fair” elections. But after theexclusionof María Corina Machado (who had won an opposition primary and has since thrown her support behind González) from the race,the US reversed course— and will now wait until the electoral process has concluded to take additional steps in either direction.
Venezuelan voters can understandthe stakes. If Maduro wins, the US and others who favor regime change will likely blame it on the lack of “free and fair” elections. The US government hasrefusedto recognize the results of prior Venezuelan elections — even when the rest of the hemisphere strongly disagreed with Washington and saw the elections as clean. And this time the US would probably cite the preelection polls as proof.
In that case, thelethalsanctions, which deprive Venezuelans of food and medicine, would almost certainly continue. A vote for Maduro is therefore a vote for continued sanctions, which means further deprivation, poverty, and elevated death rates.
As Rodrígueznoted, what is revealed by the polling adjustments is not a foregone electoral conclusion but rather the existence of a “deeply divided country.” With just a few days before the vote, most of the international concern has been about whether or not Maduro will accept the results (assuming he will lose). But equally as dangerous is the assumption that the only way he wins is through a massive fraud. The reality is that neither side, each with legitimate criticisms of the fairness of the vote, is likely to accept the results if they don’t go their way.
