The electoral call for October 5 was framed from Moncloa as a campaign of contrast: the old against the modern, backward steps against progress, with the echo of housing protests and with a candidate, Pedro Sánchez, presenting himself as the allegory of the future against a right painted as the black ball on the table, the one not to be touched. That frame no longer exists.
In less than a week, an event unrelated to the campaign has shifted the axis of voting, strengthened the ceilings of the right and planted discouragement among the left, which is the bloc most dependent on mobilization. And I think that, among the two paths left to the president, the one to denounce the utilitarianism of misfortune serves as a shield and the one to take responsibility for what remains to be done is the only one capable of moving a betrayed voter.
How it was convened
Sánchez announced the dissolution of the Cortes on October 5, after Congress toppled his housing decrees, and his number two, María Jesús Montero, summed up the mandate that day: “we gamble on advancing or retreating.” The pre-election slogan, “The strength of the people,” and the street, echoing the eviction of Maricarmen Abascal, pointed to the same place: a leadership election, in which the Government embodied progress and PP and Vox embodied regression.
It is a classic frame from the convener, and until October 26 it worked, because Sigma Dos for El Mundo gave the PSOE 26.1% and the PP 30.6%, with 107 PSOE seats, and Sondaxe, with fieldwork conducted before the accident, left the PP lead at 2.3 points.
How Urda has changed the polls and electoral mobilization
The speed of public opinion today is dizzying, and Urda, the second mortal stumble of high-speed governance under Óscar Puente after the 46 deaths in Adamuz in January, has transformed the campaign’s trajectory in days. The three polls conducted entirely after the crash and the others published these days with fieldwork around the accident paint the same picture: the PSOE falls for the first time below 25% in Sigma Dos (24.6% and 99 seats, eight fewer than a week earlier), stays at 25.5% in Target Point for El Debate and the sum of PP and Vox moves between 196 and 208 deputies depending on the firm.
The picture can shift; what matters for this analysis is the mechanism. The deputy director of research at Sigma Dos, Ignacio Clemente, explained it on COPE: the direct transfer from PSOE to PP has risen from 6.9% before the accident to 9.5%. Asked whether the revival of left-wing voters drawn by the housing crisis had stalled, he replied: “Some, yes.” Target Point sees that transfer at 9.8% and measures PSOE vote loyalty at 63.6%, versus 78% for PP and 88.1% for Vox, and 16.7% of undecided and abstaining among 2023 PSOE voters.
“The direct transfer from PSOE to PP has risen from 6.9% before the accident to 9.5%”
Dicho en lengua de campaña: the right has reinforced its ceilings and the left has lost the ground it had just recovered. And the asymmetry is not new. Belén Barreiro showed in 2002 in the Revista Española de Ciencia Política, with the general elections from 1986 to 2000, that since 1996 left-wing voters are less likely to participate than right-wing ones. The ideology predicts their behavior less well, because other issues outside the axis weigh more, such as corruption or the perception that a governing team, then the PP, is better at addressing problems.
The left-wing voter is more demanding of their own, so the mobilization of their bloc fluctuates most from one election to another, while the right’s mobilization is more like a constant.
Ignacio Urquizu summarized it in September with a phrase that applies to this week: “emotions on the left demobilize and on the right mobilize.”
Feijóo, Vox and the new axis of the campaign: governance
To that demobilization adds the other street front. The anonymous Blocus calls, which left 133 people detained in Barcelona on October 24, have dates set for November 11 in Salt, the day of the general strike, and in twelve cities for the 30th, the day after the elections, as Albert Borràs has explained in these pages, who points to the risk that the strike will be linked to the disturbances. The result is that the campaign designed as “the positive against the negative,” the future against the black ball, has become chaos against governance, or decadence against stability. And on that axis the Government plays away from home, because the burden of proof lies with those who govern.
“The campaign designed as ‘the positive against the negative,’ the future against the black ball, has become chaos against governance, or decadence against stability”
Feijóo has joined the frame shift with considerable accuracy. He suspended pre-campaigning during the three days of official mourning, gathered on Monday his National Executive Committee and set the line with a slogan, “national reconstruction,” calling on “the whole country,” with the promise, repeated since Friday, that “we will resign in the polls” and the claim of governance experience: “I do know how to do it.” His first rally will be on Saturday the 7th in Valladolid, the province headed by Puente on the PSOE list, and in Génova they have already dubbed the idea: voting for the PSOE is to endorse Óscar Puente. It is the occupation of the vacancy in initiative, that is, the moment when the rival stops answering the external frame and proposes his own.
What I find excessive is the harshness. In the same speech, Feijóo described the Government’s attitude as “infamous, cruel and vile,” said he doubted they were “good people” and demanded that they spare us “the dances, sexual innuendos or television promotions.” Political science has long measured that negative attack pays off when timely, and the charge of governance over two accidents along the same line does so, while the attack on the opponent’s moral character returning the voter to the bloc they were leaving. It’s worth remembering that the 9.5% of Socialists that Sigma Dos sees transferring to the PP is soft vote, the one that looks to a party presented as a symbol of stability for the center-right, and that voter does not need to be told that who they voted for three years ago isn’t good people. With Vox the issue is different: it was the only party that did not suspend the pre-campaign; Abascal has called Puente “Minister of Death” and the Government “criminal gang,” and the party has filed a lawsuit against Adif in Orgaz and against Puente in the Supreme Court. For the PP that conduct is useful as long as it doesn’t stick.
“The 9.5% of Socialists that Sigma Dos sees transferring to the PP is soft vote, the one that looks to a party presented as a symbol of stability for the center-right”
From here comes the double warning. A left that overplays grievance, tempted to turn governance into an offense against the victims, can end up alone defending that there is nothing to explain. A right that overplays the attack, tempted to keep the hard vote without losing the soft, can bring the PSOE back to the voter who this week was thinking of staying home or changing their ballot. And both have the date circled: the Monday, November 16 face-off will be held nineteen days before the accident, with an emotional proximity to the pain that makes the debate very hard to manage for those who must account.
The first exit: the shield
Sánchez’s first move is the one Puente has already pointed to when talking about Feijóo’s “double standard”: to denounce the utilitarian use of misfortune. It has a basis, because not every part of the right has done the same, and the contrast between a PP that paused and a Vox that kept its actions in Santander and Valladolid talking about “Minister of Death” is in the archives. It serves as a shield against the demobilizing component of a second accident so close to the urns, and its limit is that it only works against Vox. Against a Feijóo who kept the three days and who on Monday asked that today the president testify and not the minister, the shield does not stop the transfer, because the voter who moves to the PP moves aside from Abascal’s tone: they move because they start to buy the idea of poor governance.
The second exit: taking responsibility
The second exit is to take responsibility for what remains to be done. It pays to start with what does not work: forgiveness by itself, in politics, does not mobilize anyone, because the betrayed voter rewards what comes after contrition.
“The voter who moves to the PP moves aside from Abascal’s tone: they move because they start to buy into the idea of poor governance”
The thing that does mobilize is something else, and the disaster literature is what measures it. John Gasper and Andrew Reeves showed in 2011, with American counties between 1970 and 2006, that voters punish the ruler for the damage of a catastrophe, but that punishment is eclipsed by the reward for the response: the attentive electorate distinguishes chance from governance, rewards the declaration of disaster and federal aid, and punishes the president who denies it to a governor. Michael Bechtel and Jens Hainmueller quantified it with the Elbe flood of 2002: the response of Gerhard Schröder’s government, which was trailing in the polls, gave him seven points more in the affected districts, and part of that reward remained alive three years later. The lesson for Moncloa is precise: atonement is the condition and repair is the prize. Without it there is no way to speak to a voter who feels betrayed; with it alone you do not move them from the sofa. The thing that moves them is visible and dated repair.
That makes the debate on the 16th something different from a mere procedure. Sánchez has to come having acknowledged that the system had flaws that his Government did not fix. Next, in the same speech, it is his turn to turn that atonement into the left’s central argument: this country needs to modernize its grid and services, we know what we did and what was missing, and that cannot be the excuse to lose rights nor to dismantle a welfare state paid for with taxes. It is the only stretch where the governance axis can be returned to the right, because the liberalizing model the alternative offers, with less public investment, brings more chaos and more problems than those that have existed. And because the PP has its own Angrois: 80 dead on July 24, 2013, with Rajoy at the helm and Feijóo leading the Xunta, a comparison that Frente Amplio has already put on the table.
“The lesson for Moncloa is precise: atonement is the condition and repair is the prize”
The most serious objection to this thesis is the clock. The prizes measured by Gasper and Reeves and Bechtel and Hainmueller arrived from aid already delivered before voting, and in twenty-seven days Sánchez can only promise repair. And with a court in Orgaz investigating the case and a suit against his minister in the Supreme Court, each acknowledgment becomes a piece of evidence. Puente’s appearance in the Permanent Deputation is today and the week’s moves are small: Target Point’s poll, compared with its own previous wave, leaves the PSOE behind by only four tenths. But the Sigma Dos figure that should worry Ferraz most lies behind the percentage: the transfer between blocs, which had stalled, has reopened. That door does not close with a statement about Vox’s tone. It closes with a president who first takes responsibility and then explains why the response to a derailed train is more State and not less.
The Blocus calendar ends on November 30, the day after the elections. Sánchez’s ends on the 16th.
