Polls: Chavez's popularity slips in Venezuela

[ChangoLoa]

Source: AP

CARACAS, Venezuela – Hugo Chavez's support has declined in the polls as many Venezuelans say they are fed up with 27 percent inflation, a stagnant economy, faulty public services — and a government they see as incapable of doing much about it.

The president's popularity has slid in monthly tracking polls from a high of 61 percent after winning a vote in February to 52.8 percent last month, pollster Luis Vicente Leon of the Caracas-based firm Datanalisis said Wednesday, adding that the downward trend in the percentage who view his presidency positively has continued since.

After more than a decade in power, Chavez is still by far the country's most popular, most resilient and most divisive politician. What appears to have changed recently is that more are complaining about the high cost of living and a government that has often fallen far short of its promises.

"Whatever he offers, everything gets half-done," said Maria Martinez, a 32-year-old who once voted for Chavez but now is disenchanted. She says the government's health programs are insufficient, and the $500 or so she earns each month selling books in the street is no longer enough to support her five children. She said water reaches her Caracas slum only now and then due to a broken main that officials haven't fixed. "They always say they're going to repair the pipe, and they never do," Martinez said with a frown. "They offer and offer, and they never finish."

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091022/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_venezuela_chavez_1

[bigworld]

1. Solution: gov't takeover of the polling company

As a former supporter of Chavez, I like his intentions, but the lady quoted in the article is right. He does everything half-way. He starts projects with the best intentions, and there's no follow-through. He skits from idea to idea and is forgetting the little people as he hobknobs with other world leaders. The guy's giving socialism a bad name!

[WriteDown]

2. The AP attacks will begin in ....1......2.....3.....nt

[Judi Lynn]

3. Your polling firm source has been the subject of many conversations at D.U.

Here's one from 2 years ago:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x3076534

One posted article:

Can you believe Venezuela's pollsters?

by Justin Delacour; Narconews Bulletin; February 06, 2003

Over the last year, several correspondents in Venezuela have repeatedly attempted to portray Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as an unpopular leader. The most common basis for these statements has been the recitation of “polls” claiming that Chávez’s approval rating is down to around 30 percent.

The commercial media correspondents rarely cite the source of their polls. So this reporter contacted them, and most of the reporters offered only the names of two Venezuelan companies – Datanalisis and Keller and Associates.

An investigation into the operations of these two Venezuelan polling firms and their relationships with correspondents reveals that, by any fair measure, it is irresponsible for correspondents to cite the two firms’ polls without also mentioning that the two firms are headed by virulently anti-Chavez figures who frequently use polling samples that are unrepresentative of the overall Venezuelan population.

The first factor that calls the polls into question is the well-known political partisanship of the polling firms’ directors, Jose Antonio Gil Yepes of Datanalisis and Alfredo Keller of Keller and Associates.

In a recent e-mail interchange, The Los Angeles Times’ correspondent T. Christian Miller acknowledged that the two pollsters are “pretty anti-Chavez,” but he defends their credibility on grounds that "both do door to door polling, to get the poorest of poor represented in their surveys, and also balance for things like gender and region." Miller’s defense of Keller and Gil Yepes is very questionable in view of contrary evidence. However, before presenting this contrary evidence, we would like to point out the problems with the two pollsters’ political partisanship.

Datanalisis' Pollster: Chavez "has to be killed"

Gil Yepes and Keller are not merely “anti-Chavez”; they are openly and virulently anti-Chavez. In a July 8 article in the Los Angeles Times, Miller describes Gil Yepes as a man of “Venezuela’s elite” who “moves in circles of money, power and influence” and “was educated in top U.S. schools.”

It’s certainly shocking that the LA Times quoted Gil Yepes saying that Chavez “has to be killed.”

But it is even more shocking that the LA Times and other commercial media continued to use Gil Yepes’ polling “results” after his homicidal fantasies leaped out of the closet through the pages of last July’s LA Times.

According to T. Christian Miller of the LA Times, Gil Yepes saw an assassination as the only way out of the “political crisis surrounding President Hugo Chavez.” Gil Yepes has since claimed that his quote was taken out of context, and that he was only making reference to an oft-expressed sentiment among Chavez’s opposition.

But let’s look at the full context as reported by the LA Times:

Jose Antonio Gil is among Venezuela's elite.

He moves in circles of money, power and influence. He was educated in top U.S. schools. He heads of one of the country's most prestigious polling firms.

And he can see only one way out of the political crisis surrounding President Hugo Chavez.

"He has to be killed," he said, using his finger to stab the table in his office far above this capital's filthy streets. "He has to be killed."

One need look no further than Datanalisis’ website to find the kind of blatant political partisanship that one normally does not associate with respectable polling operations. For example, in Datanalisis’ summary of a July 2002 report, the polling firm absurdly characterizes the current political conflict as one between the government (“el oficialismo”) and “the rest of the country.”

Despite the preposterousness of this portrayal, it is nevertheless an appropriate demonstration of the deep-seated class hatred by a large segment of Venezuela’s business-led opposition, which prefers to pretend that thousands of poor and working-class Chavez supporters do not exist.

When a massive pro-government demonstration in Caracas on October 13 showed that a good portion of “the rest of the country” supported Chavez, the editorial board of Venezuela’s elite-controlled newspaper El Nacional was incensed. El Nacional, which commissions and publishes polls by Datanalisis, disparagingly referred to Chavez’s supporters as “lumpen” who were lured from the country’s interior with “a piece of bread and some rum” to “come and cheer the great con man of the nation.”

As the Venezuelan anthropologist Johnny Alarcón Puentes points out, the terms "lumpen, rabble hordes, drunks, riff-raff and mobs are only some of the epithets foisted by the wealthy on citizens of dark skin, on street merchants, on workers, on the indigenous and on all those who live in slums or modest neighborhoods and dare raise their voice against the powerful.”

Thus, from the warped perspective of much of the opposition, Datanalisis’ contention that "the rest of the country" opposes Chavez makes sense. Since elites are the people that “matter,” and those of less privilege can be reduced to virtual sub-human status, poor and working-class Chavez supporters do not qualify as part of “the rest of the country.”

http://www.zmag.org/znet_help.htm

~~~~~~~~~~~~

~snip~
Our source informs us that Datanalisis’ polling samples are less skewed than Keller’s due to the firm’s superior operational team of field workers and access to Venezuela’s 1998 census tracts. However, the poll that Gil Yepes is currently releasing about the population’s views of the so-called “general strike” and Chavez’s handling of the crisis appears to be highly deceptive.

Here’s another fact unreported by English-language correspondents who cite polls by Gil Yepes and Keller as gospel: Since the “strike” began on December 2, Chavistas are not allowing Datanalisis’ field workers into the Chavista-controlled slums of Caracas and Maracaibo. While Gil Yepes recently released lopsided polls that purport popular support for the “strike,” he fails to mention that his polling sample excludes the populous slums where the “strike” has proved to be a complete failure. The progressive economist Mark Weisbrot, who recently spent time in Caracas, wrote a column for the Washington Post explaining that there were “few signs of the strike” in “most of the city, where poor and working-class people live.”

The academic source said that Keller and Gil Yepes generally do not poll rural inhabitants. The opposition newspapers that commission the polls are not willing to pay the increased costs that rural polling entails. Thus, landless peasants who may benefit from Chavez’s agrarian reform are also excluded from polling samples.

http://www.zmag.org/znet_help.htm

~~~~~~~~~~~~

~snip~
In early February 2003, the anti-Chavez Venezuelan polling firms
Datanalisis and Consultores 21 held a joint press conference in Caracas
claiming to be "neutral parties"in the country's deeply polarized
political conflict. Just over two weeks before the press conference, I
reported that Datanalisis' President Jose Antonio Gil Yepes had told the
Los Angeles Times in July 2002 that Chavez "has to be killed."I pointed
out that a simple glance at Datanalisis' website revealed "the kind of
blatant political partisanship that one normally does not associate with
respectable polling operations"(as this report goes to print,
Datanalisis' website has been running John Kerry's Chavez-bashing
misstatement at the top of their "news"column for over a month).

Since I first reported on Datanalisis' blatant partisanship and biased
polling, Gil Yepes has mysteriously disappeared as a public spokesperson
for his company (although he occasionally pops up brandishing a letter
from L.A. Times correspondent T. Christian Miller, who now supposedly
claims that the pollster did not have criminal intent when he told
Miller that Chavez "has to be killed").

With Gil Yepes' reputation in question, the job of restoring
Datanalisis' mythic neutrality was left to company director Luis Vicente
Leon. Never mind that Leon had also been making blatantly anti-Chavez
statements to the press long before Gil Yepes blurted out his homicidal
fantasies to the L.A. Times. In Venezuela, where Chavez-bashing
journalists abound, "neutrality"means telling the business-controlled
propaganda apparatus what it wants to hear.

Thus, in the spirit of "neutrality,"Leon made a startling announcement
at the conference of February 2003. Although it had long been
established that Chavez enjoyed his highest levels of support among the
poor, Leon declared that Datanalisis' latest "poll"disproved the
"myth"that public opinion was divided along class lines. According to
Leon, "people of lower incomes"had become even more inclined to reject
Chavez than the rest of Venezuelan society.

http://www.mail-archive.com/[e-mail]/msg91974.html

[ChangoLoa]

5. Absurd to see the Venezuelan government using datanalisis number so much?

Chavistas in Venezuela consider that there are 2 or 3 credible pollsters in the country: IVAD, PLM and Datanalisis. Many times, their calculation mistakes were in favor of Chavez, as in the 2007 referendum:

"Las tres encuestadoras más reconocidas de Venezuela dieron una amplia mayoría al Sí frente al No en sus primeros resultados de la contienda para refrendar las reformas constitucionales propuestas por el primer mandatario Hugo Chávez Frías...PLM Consultores, Datanálisis y el Instituto Venezolano de Análisis de Datos (IVAD), reflejan en sus primeros conteos grandes similitudes en los resultados, arrojando que el pueblo venezolano ha elegido por los cambios a la Constitución que encaminarán a Venezuela en un rumbo de profundización hacia el socialismo."
http://www.aporrea.org/actualidad/n105747.html

In other occasion, Datanalisis reflects the trends in favor of Chavez from the public opinion:
Datanálisis: 57,3% aprueban la labor del presidente Chávez, 5% más que en el mes de junio
http://www.aporrea.org/actualidad/n141476.html

All their polls get published in chavista media such as APORREA.ORG, which is basically the voice of the revolution in the internet.

By the way, the last polls from IVAD, the favorite of the government, reflect as well this slip in popularity that Chavez is showing.

But don't worry, if you had taken time to read the article, you would have understood that "Yet Chavez still faces no strong political opponents with anywhere near as much support" and that "Until now, there's been no one else who can compete with him". His popularity is eroding a little like in the past, don't panic.

[EFerrari]

7. Um, no, IVAD doesn't show that. They have his popularity about ten points up

from this Datanalysis poll.

And, btw, you're attempting to browbeat one of the most conscientious posters to this board. Nice going. It's about six feet too late for you to stop digging.

[ChangoLoa]

8. I know the last poll from IVAD

Have you even read it? Or just the incomplete report on venezuelanalysis? Do you have the poll? Share it with us.

Did you know the IVAD poll was made in august and Datanalisis 3 weeks ago? Did you know what it says or why Chavez must have been angry when he read it? Did you see the intentions of vote for 2012?

Once again, you're out of context and seem clueless. It's normal since you have shown us that you usually don't read the documents you refer to. You are a supporter and that's your choice. But when you support some leader with fraudulent arguments, you actually harm that leader. I suggest you try at least to do some research before you talk that far.

[Braulio]

9. An expert friend says

Datanalsis is fairly reliable. Also, there's no question Chavez is losing popularity. You do realize it's mathematically impossible for a politician to stay up in the polls all the time. This is even more so when the economy is heading down.

I don't think anybody in their right mind would question this as a fact, after all the world economy just took a kick in the teeth, and this also impacted Venezuela.

Since people tend to "vote with their wallets" almost everywhere, it's reasonable to think people are unhappy with Chavez. The common bloke on the street isn't interested in excuses, he just wants the fat cheque to buy the ninja sword with the kung-fu grip for his boy.

[ro1942]

4. If you can't afford them

why have so many children

[ChangoLoa]

6. malthusian? nt.

[Braulio]

10. Because the Pope say so

Venezuelans, like most third world nations, have a problem with high population growth. Some of it is caused by uneducated women who lack access to birth control, and some of it, my guess, is driven by Catholic priests who follow a Pope who lives in the 5th century.