Everyone seems to be worried about the latest Greenberg poll which shows that the No vote is leading the Si vote. I am not. Basically, I find a few things in this poll puzzling and contradictory.
First of all, based on my fairly intense experience with interpreting polls in Venezuela I know one thing: The hardest variable to measure in Venezuela is whether the person plans to vote or not. In the last few elections, most pollsters were reporting abstentions below 20% and they all came in at levels near 40%, a significant difference. Moreover, this shyness about telling the truth is highest the lower you go in social strata, where abstention tends to be the highest. Thus, it seems very strange to me that the Greenberg poll will not even tell us what the raw data says, which is the proper way to do it given the problem with determining whether people will vote or not. As an example, the same techniques being use by Greenberg revealed in November that 4.4 million people were planning to sign the petition against Chavez and we know Sumate handed in only 3.45 million signatures, so the error is significant.
My second reason for discarding the data is that it contradicts most of the data, once you rule out “phantom” pollsters like “North American Opinion Research”, the only poll that coincides with Greenberg and is as “North American” as joropo or a Reina Pepiada arepa. I know most people do not trust Venezuelan pollsters, but I have the files from the last ten years and the main mistake by pollsters in the last three presidential elections was that only one pollster said Claudio Fermin would come in second place against Caldera in 1993, which he did. In fact, if you take the two races in which Chavez participated, pollsters would give their results as: Chavez xx%, #2 yy%, #3 zz% and don’t know/abstention ww%. If you subtract the latter and renormalize the data, no major pollster was out of the range of the final results. In fact, Consultores 21, which has the Si vote comfortably in first place today, was always accused of being pro-Chavez because in both elections it told the truth, it said that Chavez could not lose. Today it is being disqualified as “pro-opposition”.
My last point is qualitative. If I look back to 2001 to the Datos poll (Datos gathers the data for Greenberg) the latest Greenberg poll says that Chavez has exactly the same support and opposition that he did in 2001, very hard to believe in my opinion.
To me the Greenberg poll has something very positive about it: It undermines the confidence of the opposition leaders, forcing them to work hard and be very careful with what they do. However, it does have in my opinion a very negative effect in influencing the campaign by the opposition. Basically I think all of the opposition needs to do is to have its supporters go and vote, the Greenberg poll is making them think that they need to “attract” the pro-Chavez crowd in order to win. To me, the opposition has to concentrate in getting out the vote from its supporters, guaranteeing that there will be no fraud and that people do not feel afraid of expressing their opinion. After all, if more than 50% of the population really wanted Chavez to stay, then those of us in the opposition would have to wait another day and accept the results of this democratic process. But we will not have to.
The Devil's Excrement 
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