The results of the Spanish general election on 23rd July surprised everyone. Although there is still no certain candidate for investiture as the next prime minister, and the shadow of a repeat election continues to hang over the political scene, few people believed that the Socialist (PSOE) leader Pedro Sánchez would come out of the election as the candidate with most options ahead of the People's Party (PP) head Alberto Núñez Feijóo. In fact, only 32% of Spaniards saw Pedro Sánchez as the next Spanish prime minister a week before the July 23rd vote. This is according to the Centre for Sociological Research (CIS), the publically-run Spanish research agency, which has released a study this Thursday on the voting trends in the last week before the polls, and what motivated voters to vote for the candidates. Spanish law prohibits new poll results from being published in the last five days before an election, and the results of the tracking survey have thus only been released now. The research shows that 51.6% of respondents believed, in the last few days before the election, that Alberto Núñez Feijóo would be the new leader of a Spanish coalition government. As well, according to CIS data, almost 85% of those consulted were convinced that the next government in Spain would be a coalition between several parties and only 12% believed that a monochromatic, single-party government would emerge from the election.
From July 17th to 22nd, just before the elections, the CIS interviewed an average of 3,000 people a day, from a total sample of close to 27,000 respondents. The results show that the current PM's electoral expectations rose in the last ten days before the election, while Feijóo's dropped by several tenths of a percent the day before voting. When asked who they preferred to be the next Spanish PM, 36.0% preferred Sánchez, as against the 28.7% who opted for Feijóo.
The vote by mail, favourable to PSOE and Sumar
The research centre also used its survey to ask citizens who had already voted by mail how they had cast their vote. This voting modality was, according to the responses given, more favourable to the left-wing bloc than the right-wing one. The CIS states that more than half of the respondents in this situation opted for left-wing parties (30.9% for the PSOE and 20.16% for Sumar), while 26.3% voted for the PP and 7.8% Vox.
If we add the total votes by mail to the poll's forecast for the intentions of election-day voters, as they stood in the week before the elections, the PSOE had 28.3% of support, the PP, 24.8%, while Sumar was the third largest party (14.1%) and Vox, the fourth (9.4%). These predictions, however, were not finally reflected in the ballot boxes: the July 23rd vote count yielded a percentage of 33.05% of valid votes for the PP, 31.70% for the PSOE, 12.39% for Vox and 12.31% for Sumar. The CIS also failed to grasp the role that abstention would play in these atypical elections. On July 22nd, 83.2% of respondents told the agency's pollsters that they would definitely vote, but the actual turnout was 70.4% in the end.
Controversies over the CIS's polling
The difference between what the polls predicted and what ended up happening, and the margin of error in the results, is scarcely a new development. However, in recent years, the CIS surveys have attracted criticism and mistrust from social science experts due to their methodological opacity and for producing results that sometimes diverge wildly from other studies. During the electoral campaign for the 23rd July election, for example, the CIS was the only body that gave victory to the PSOE, while most polls predicted a victory for the parties of the right. It is worth noting, however, that the polls that gave an overwhelming majority to the PP and Vox did not come close to the final results either. In fact, the current scenario with Pedro Sánchez having options to repeat his leadership of the Spanish government was not foreseen by the polls, and neither was the scenario that has now opened for the investiture of the next prime minister.