Mitofsky on Presidential Possibilities

The pollster finds that on a generic ballot, the PRI wins with almost 40 percent of the vote, about 23 points up on the PAN and 30 points ahead of the PRD. This far exceeds the advantages the PRI had in May 2004, the same distance from Calderon's election. When asked for their favorite candidate but not prompted, Enrique Peña Nieto is mentioned by more than a quarter of the respondents, more than 20 points more than the second-place finisher (AMLO). He has actually gone up in this measure since February, despite the horrible handling of the Paulette case. Of course, that's a crude measure of name recognition, so perversely, insofar as people have heard Peña Nieto talked about more but haven't come around to the accusations that his government bungled, perhaps deliberately, the investigation of a four-year-old's killer, the Paulette case might have helped.

Moving on to responses when each party's possibilities are mentioned: the most commonly mentioned alternative to Peña Nieto, Manlio Fabio Beltrones, is the fourth most popular priísta for priístas and non-priístas alike, behind Peña Nieto, Fidel Herrera, and Beatriz Paredes. In the PRD, AMLO is significantly more popular than Marcelo Ebrard among party faithful, but significantly less popular among the population at large. For the PAN, it's shaping up as a two-horse race between Santiago Creel and Josefina Vazquéz, with the latter enjoying a signficant edge at this point.

As always, it's only 2010, we have a long way to go, anything can happen, grain of salt, blah, blah, blah.