[UPDATE] This post may have been an early reaction to a cheap poll wars launched by HCR supporters through 2001 and Ultimas Noticias. Still, never having erased one of my posts I am not going to start now :)
What do you know? I was writing yesterday that the numbers were making Capriles Radonski an almost sure winner and today 2001 publishes that Consultores 21 and Datanilis see a comfortable victory for HCR. Of course, as usual, when things are so delicate, we only get the newspaper article, no real details on how the poll were made, etc, etc... so a grain of salt with the interpretation, will you please. Though we can now assume safely that unless HCR implodes, he will win next February. What is left to decide is the margin and who reaches second position since Consultores and Datanalisis are wildly different on this respect!
Consultores boldly gives HCR between 45 and 55 %. Apparently the poll was held the last days of December. So considering that we are barely in the second week of January it seems like a rapid survey, probably a phone one or something like that, quickly calculated. Valid still, even if it is made probably at the least politically significant week of the year, but not good enough for assessing a margin of victory, and even less to state that Perez has 16,8 Lopez 13,8 Machado 2,4. I love that the three get exact decimal and HCR gets a whooping range..... Memo to me: I have to learn to kill the inner scientist in me.
Datanalisis at least gives a decimal to all of them and right then and there I trust it better. Not to mention that its numbers look more rational. HCR is at 35,6 , followed by Lopez at 20,2 and 18,4 for Perez.
Conclusion: Arria, Machado and Medina are now out. It is too bad for Maria Corina Machado who this week gave the best TV performance in the Globovision series I mentioned earlier. She knows her stuff. She has real ideas, real programs that make sense and are away from wishful thinking, or the elaborate comeflorismo of HCR. She cares, or at least fakes it much better than the other (Arria does not pretend to care but his campaign has a different objective). Too bad, as the US has learned long ago, that primaries process do not yield the best candidate necessarily.... And as far as I am concerned Lopez and Machado are the best ones, the ones I would love to trust the country to. But what do I know? I am not a comeflor nor a chavista.....
Ps: reader EV brings up more annoying information and the whole thing is maybe a poll war between factions with meaningless leaks and I fell for them. Or the journalists who wrote that article is more of an ass as I thought before. We should also remember that 2001 may have endorsed Capriles, and that as of this typing no word on these numbers elsewhere.