Feijóo recovers after the debate

Just a month ago there was a change in the trend of the polls that has reached the debate on Monday between Feijóo and Sánchez: the president of the PP had a 95% probability of being president of the Government and the start of the socialist campaign with the interviews on television and negotiations with Vox progressively reduced that advantage to 90%, then to 80, 75 until 68 on Monday.

What happened? We verified it in the surveys of these last days: the trend has changed again after the face to face, it has been reversed. Feijóo recovers probability, goes back above 75%, once again, turns around a trend that will have to be confirmed until 23-J to reach the electoral appointment with a probability above 90%.

The economic world that Expansión reads is more used to calculating probabilities according to different scenarios and the firm Demoscopia y Servicios, led by its associate director Arcadio Mateo, translates the surveys that are published daily through the Political Strategy System (SEP) into the probability index that we see in the 'Las llaves de La Moncloa' graph.

The system estimates the provincial distribution of seats for each party from the polls. Next, it generates 14,641 possible vote configurations, with variations between one and seven tenths for each of the four national parties. This translates into 14,641 provincial distributions of seats that serve as the basis for calculating the probabilities of the three governance scenarios.

It is a simulator that has allowed us to design these scenarios and assign them a probability, in addition to tracking these predictions based on the weighted average of all the polls published in previous days during the days of the electoral campaign. In this case, those that appeared until yesterday Wednesday and from those that were made public in mid-June.

What are the scenarios?

1) An optimistic scenario for Feijóo, with a PP governing alone over 160 deputies.

2) An average scenario with an adjusted PP victory with Vox as an ally to govern.

3) A pessimistic scenario for the PP with Sánchez's PSOE being able to again add a majority by few seats.

The first scenario currently has a degree of probability of 0%, at least for now. The second scenario has evolved from 94.7% on June 19 to 77.7% on July 12, with a turning point at 67.7% on Monday, before the debate. The third scenario has gone from 5.3% to 32.3% and since yesterday 22.3%, downwards.

That is the photo, to this day: two changes in trend in the campaign so far, the first increasing for Sánchez his probability of repeating, although always below 50%, and the other after the debate, starting for Feijóo what That seems like a recovery of the probability in his favor that can give him the necessary peace of mind to reach the end of the campaign without any surprises.

The keys to La Moncloa are still up in the air, but the face-to-face at Atresmedia this Monday, July 10, has clearly marked a turning point in the campaign. What is the password? The 55% of Spaniards who gave Feijóo as the winner of the debate, the 22.3% of socialist voters who saw him and were convinced of Feijóo and the 1.3 million voters to whom face to face has contributed to change their voting decision.

What will happen in the remaining week? We will find out in the last installment of this special section, next Tuesday the 18th, when we collect the data from the latest surveys published by the different media according to the period established by law and we convert it into the degree of probability that one or another, Feijóo or Sánchez, are presidents of the Government. We will also be attentive to the data on whether the probability that Feijóo will be president without Vox begins to take shape...

Ricardo Gomez Diez. Dircom expert in Reputation and professor of the Master of Corporate and Institutional Communication of the Carlos III University of Madrid