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One Month before Venezuela’s Presidential Election Polls Show Huge Leads for Chávez

Venezuela Solidarity Campaign | September 18th 2012

With just one month left before Venezuelans go to the ballot box, a survey of recent opinion polls shows significant leads for Hugo Chávez in the race to be Venezuela’s next president.

The average of all 13 polls carried out in August and in the first week of September, saw Hugo Chávez on 51% and Henrique Capriles on 35% giving Chávez an average lead of 16% (See table 1).

Such a lead would translate into an advantage of more than two million votes for Hugo Chávez on October 7th.

Of these 13 polls surveyed, 11 gave a lead for Hugo Chávez and just two put the main challenger, Henry Capriles Radonski, ahead. (See chart 1 to the right).

In the 11 polls putting Hugo Chávez ahead, all but one gives him a lead of between 13-28%. In contrast, the two polls that put Henry Capriles Radonski ahead gave him leads of just 2% and 4%. […]

Lee Brown who carried out the survey for the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign, said:

“Hugo Chávez clearly has a convincing lead according to the overwhelming majority of pollsters.

The evidence from looking at the full range of polls, rather than cherry picking, does not back up the claims of the campaign of Henrique Capriles Radonski that the race is close or that Capriles is ahead.

Nor is there any evidence that Capriles is making any real inroads into Chávez’s lead as they’ve also claimed.

Hopefully these statements from the right-wing opposition are just the kind of things that get said in the cut and thrust of a campaign.

But the bigger worry is that it’s part of an orchestrated claim by the opposition to give the impression of an impending victory and then to claim fraud on 7 October should they lose, as the polls suggest is very likely.”

Notes

1) The VSC analysis was based on the following poll results published in August and the first week of September, exactly one month before the election.

September 19, 2012 - Posted by | Aletho News | , , ,

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