Another Troubled Executive

I missed this earlier, but Berumen's most recent poll also had some bad news for Marcelo Ebrard. His approval rating in Mexico City dropped to 50 percent, the lowest of his term. Eight months ago, the same poll pegged his approval at 64 percent. We're still a long, long way from 2012, but the broader political trends, from Ebrard's fade relative to AMLO to the PAN's ongoing dysfunction, are increasingly favorable to Enrique Peña Nieto. Although if the PAN-PRD alliances continue in some meaningful way beyond 2010, it'll be interesting to see how that impacts the 2012 presidential calculus.

Another interesting finding: 54 percent of Mexico City residents say that security is their biggest problem, compared to 13 percent saying the crisis and 8 percent who said unemployment. The 54 percent represents a nine-point jump from November. This despite the fact that the economy is by and large perceived as the more important problem across the country, and Mexico City is safer than the rest of the country on average. (Of course, murder rates aren't the only way to measure security, but you would expect them to broadly indicative of the general security climate.)

So what explains this cognitive dissonance? Is habitual complaining about crime in Mexico City inflating perceptions of how bad it truly is? Are the residents of Mexico City more protected from the present economic conditions? A bit of both?