Rivaling the PRI: The Image Management of Vicente Fox and the Use of Public Opinion Polling in the 2000 Mexican Election

Latin American Politics and Society, Summer 2005 by Rottinghaus, Brandon, Alberro, Irina

ABSTRACT

This research examines the data from private polls conducted during Vicente Fox's presidential campaign through the lenses of the "modernization" of campaigning, the creation of image in the modern Mexican presidency, and the survey tools used by the campaign to achieve a historic presidential victory in 2000. Fox's campaign team used polling to determine the potential of the Mexican public to be persuaded by an opposition candidate, to provide a continuous update on how the campaign strategy was working, to assist in solidifying Fox's image and message of change (rather than promoting his policy agenda), and to target demographic groups that were perceived to be important electoral partners. These findings suggest that public opinion polling is a useful tool in Mexico to combat longstanding corporatist structures used to favor the PRI. Presidential campaigns in Mexico are beginning to resemble modern campaigns in other mature democracies in their use of private polling data; future Mexican campaigns will become more image- and personality-based.

The 2000 presidential election in Mexico was a momentous event. After more than seven decades in power, the center-left Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institutional, PRI) lost the presidency to the coalition called Alliance for Change (Alianza por el Cambio) between the Green Party (Partido Verde Ecologista de México, PVM) and the National Action Party (Partido Accion Nacional, PAN) and its candidate, Vicente Fox. For the first time in Mexican history, the country's future was in the hands not of a career federal bureaucrat but of a coalition headed by a former executive of a multinational corporation.1 Because of heightened electoral competition and a more attentive voting public, politicians decided that it was necessary to gather reliable and accurate information about voters. Private opinion polling conducted by the Fox team during the 2000 campaign helped to identify and strengthen the ties between the public in general and Fox and furthered the use of polling in Mexico.

We know much about the 2000 election from the outside (the edited volume utilizing panel surveys and journalistic accounts by Domínguez and Lawson, 2004, is an excellent resource), but few scholars have had the opportunity to look at the challenger's internal opinion polling to assess how elections are changing in Mexico. This research note examines Fox's private campaign polling data, in addition to interviews with campaign staff members in charge of conducting and interpreting the polling results, to answer questions about the role of public opinion polling in campaign "modernization" in general and in the 2000 Fox campaign in particular.

The Fox campaign utilized polling as a result of a growing trend toward the professionalization of political campaigns in Mexico.2 The "modernization" (or often "Americanization") of campaigns has been a frequent topic of inquiry in political science literature, and the introduction of public opinion polls into a campaign structure is a key element. Jacobson (1978, 1980, 1996) first identifies this trend in the United States (see also Angell et al. 1992; Waisbord 1996; Mayobre 1996), while others find the same trend in Western Europe (Asp and Esaiasson 1996; Schoenbach 1996) and Latin America (Waisbord 1996; Mayobre 1996). Mancini and Swanson argue that two themes emerge as the causes of such electoral innovations: a fundamental transformation in the relationship of political parties to their constituents, and a shift in the fortunes of political parties to rest on opinion rather than membership and historical allegiances. Specifically for the latter, the means for cultivating and shaping public opinion become critical to electoral success (1996, 250-51).

The 2000 election in Mexico presented both of these elements. The PRI's inability to rally its own supporters as in the past and Fox's insistence on creating his own campaign organization, Friends of Fox, independent of his party, the PAN, illustrates that parties were marginalized in 2000 (Bruhn 2004). The use of polling to shape and control public opinion was a key element of the Fox campaign's electoral strategy. This modernization is also important in the democratization process in general, and the Mexican case in particular, because of the assumption that more sophisticated knowledge of public opinion from several candidates leads to greater political competition. In this case, the Fox campaign was able to understand and mold public opinion toward Fox's image and to beat the other campaigns at selling its candidate and message.

Mancini and Swanson discuss the value of cataloging the "rapid changes" in campaigning in various countries. Although the length of this research note is not appropriate to conduct a truly comparative study, the unique data presented here document the use of public opinion polls by an opposition candidate and provide an interesting window into the challenger's struggles to combat the institutional advantage afforded to the PRI through the corporatist system (Mancini and Swanson 1996, 2). First widely introduced in 1988 and utilized by the Carlos Salinas Administration throughout its term (1988-94), public opinion polling was not considered objective or useful by the public because the use of polls was so closely tied to the PRI and to the presidency (Camp 1996).3 Camp concludes, "There is no way of knowing, for example, if polls determined the actual campaign strategy of Mexico's leading presidential contenders in 1994 in the same way that they contributed to [challenger] Bill Clinton's focus on the economy in his successful race against President George [H. W.] Bush" (1996, 6). The internal data from the 2000 Fox campaign presented in this note help to analyze how the polling operation of the Fox campaign related to Fox's actions during the campaign. This causal interaction demonstrates the importance of image in the election and the Fox campaign's reliance on persuasive imagery as a campaign strategy.