Back in 2018 I wrote a short post about what I had always considered one of the structural quirks of Colombian democracy: presidential elections, held every four years, always collide with the Football World Cup. When Colombia qualifies, football takes center stage in the national conversation and the election campaigns have to fight for attention.
Today is May 31st — first round of the 2026 presidential election — and the timing is even tighter than it was eight years ago. The World Cup kicks off on June 11th, just eleven days from now. Unless there is a first-round victory, which looks unlikely since the leading candidate, Iván Cepeda, was polling below the threshold back in April, the runoff will take place on June 21st — right in the middle of the group stage. Colombia's third group match, against Uzbekistan, is on June 17th. Colombians vote again four days after that.
We need to focus on this election — it's so important! But honestly, I have a feeling the country is going to get distracted again, with its attention pulled toward 'mi selección'. Seriously, some things just never change. 🤦♂️
The US Democratic primaries are around the corner, with the first state voting next Monday. I was curious how the Google search trends in the last 7 days reflect on each of the top-tier candidates. Bernie Sanders is clearly winning in that “interest” field. It will be interesting to see what happens in the actual Iowa caucuses.
On the 25th of April, Joe Biden announced he was joining the crowded Democratic primary race. The aggregate polls show an interesting trend. Even before his announcement he was leading the polls, but there was a clear bump in his numbers afterwards. It will be interesting to see what happens in the months ahead. Will those trends continue, and will the main race be between him and Bernie Sanders, or will another candidate get into the top spot? Time will tell.
I have always believed one of the main problems with the presidential elections in Colombia, held every four years, is the timing: they always coincide with the Football World Cup! Football is an extremely popular sport in the country, and when the national squad qualifies for the tournament, the country turns its attention away from everything except this event.
The graph above, generated with Google Trends data, supports this point, at least in the online sphere: Colombians are more interested in searching for information about World Cup topics than about the presidential race.
The first round of this election will take place on May 27th and the second round on June 17th (the World Cup starts on the 14th). Just saying...
When Theresa May announced her intention to call a general election back in April, the Conservative lead over Labour in the polls was around 21%. As you can see in the graph above, this lead has been shrinking over time. It will be very interesting to see what happens in this election next month.
Today the French are voting in their presidential election, and the possibility of having a far-right president, who has campaigned against Europe and NATO, brings dark clouds to the European horizon. I'm hoping the French people will reject those proposals. Allez les Bleus!
The poll aggregates from RealClearPolitics show that opinion of Trump has never been more favorable than unfavorable. In fact, it has been reported that he took office as one of the most unpopular presidents in modern history. The trend shows it's going down again after a short increase following the election.
Looking at the final 2016 US presidential election results, it's remarkable how badly Trump lost in California: 8.7 million vs 4.4 million votes. It's not surprising that in the days after the election the #calexit hashtag started to trend. Clinton won the popular vote, so many Americans will feel underrepresented by the electoral college system they have in place, but nowhere is this more dramatic than in California.
This morning I woke up very early feeling a bit uneasy. I started to follow the live US presidential coverage, and then slowly it became clear that the Republican nominee was going to win. As I mentioned a couple of days ago, the main danger with this outcome is that nationalist groups might feel empowered to spread and promote their hate speech. I'm really hoping this won't happen. And it was definitely a complete poll miss. A dangerous one.
Alright, the latest 4-way presidential polls still put Clinton slightly ahead. Fingers crossed the lead will hold. Yesterday the FBI director sent a letter clarifying there was nothing new in the emails from last week, so I hope US voters will be able to weigh the flaws of the Democratic nominee against the real sexist, racist, protectionist, and xenophobic positions of the Republican nominee.
Yesterday I saw the excellent documentary "Hate Rising" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOsRktPBNhI), a film where the journalist Jorge Ramos explores how the current US election has empowered white nationalist groups, leading to a rise in hate in that country, including attacks on minority communities. This documentary brought back memories of my mother, because I'm sure she would be extremely disappointed. Before she got sick and passed away, she worked with the Girl Scouts of the USA, setting up programs to make Latino girls proud of their heritage and to help all girls feel equal and part of one nation.
"The most important task in my job is to make one world. It's important for the Latinos and it's important for the American people.", my mom used to say. I have been following the US presidential election closely, not only because I have many relatives and friends living in that country, but also because I truly believe its outcome will have important repercussions around the world.
If you don't want to live in a country where hate is normalized, where sexist and misogynist views come from the top leadership, and where your liberties and rights get curtailed under the "law and order" sophism, please vote in this binary election! As a European, I followed the Brexit vote closely because I still think the European Union project has brought a lot of stability and peace to this continent, and I thought it would be bad for my adopted Irish nation. As you know, the Leave camp won mainly on “immigration control” grounds, and unfortunately the attacks against immigrant communities increased immediately after the vote. The future of this nation looks gloomy, since most of the promises of the Leave camp were not attainable.
On the other hand, as a Colombian, I was extremely hopeful about the referendum to accept the peace agreements signed in Cuba to put an end to the oldest civil conflict on the Latin American continent. For the first time during the civil war, the two sides were serious about ending the conflict and didn’t use the talks as a strategy of war. It pained my heart to see how a disinformation campaign orchestrated by the opposition helped the No camp win. Now, this conflict, affecting mainly the minority populations living in the most remote and poorest parts of the country, is in a very dangerous stalemate.
As an immigrant on the other side of the Atlantic, I'm really hoping the people appearing in Jorge’s documentary are a minority and that they don't reflect the United States population overall. And I really hope the outcome of the US presidential election will reflect this.
So please don't fall into the fear trap: go out and vote to take a stand against the people attacking the diversity that’s so needed in this world.
FiveThirtyEight, an interesting site focused on opinion poll analysis, has become one of the most quoted sites in political news. A couple of days ago they published an interesting article on what the US electoral map would look like if only women voted, based on their poll models. It's interesting how it would be a landslide defeat for Donald Trump!
According to Nielsen, the viewer numbers for the first presidential debate between Trump and Clinton are out, and it was the most viewed debate in the history of presidential debates (84 million viewers). The second closest was the one between Reagan and Carter in 1980.
The US presidential election is far from over, since there are still some weeks ahead until November, but it's comforting to see evidence in the polls that Trump's divisive campaign is not "winning" at all.
The map above shows the countries that currently have or have ever had a female head of state. It's true that the historic nomination of Hillary Clinton is a milestone in U.S. politics, but it is not one in many countries of the world.
This morning I was reading an interesting section dedicated to the US elections on the FiveThirtyEight site. It tries to predict who will win the election based on the polls and historical data. They have been very accurate in the past, so it is definitely an interesting source.
One of the articles linked on this site was a post titled "Why Obama Might Be Trump's Biggest Challenge," which discussed how President Obama is enjoying a high approval rate. The chart above is generated with the RealClearPolitics data they mentioned in the post.
If you analyze the last 30 days of Trump's and Sanders' Twitter feeds and plot the word frequency in a word cloud, it reveals what these candidates stand for. Guess which one belongs to whom?
Asylum is defined as the protection granted by a nation to someone who has left their native country as a political refugee, mainly for fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion. Due to the raging conflict in Syria, there has been a sharp increase in the number of refugees coming to Europe.
The latest quarterly data report by Eurostat demonstrates this upward trend. Germany and Sweden are the countries that have welcomed the highest number of asylum seekers.
The last episode of the excellent show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver dealt with a very contentious issue in the US: abortion laws. I really like the approach he took on this matter, acknowledging there are different positions on this topic, but hammering the "hypocritical" laws that, under the umbrella of protecting "women's health", create barriers for people who need this medical procedure and unfortunately don't have the money to go somewhere else.
The next map shows the US states that had enacted laws to force women requiring an abortion to see an ultrasound of the unwanted pregnancy:
Yesterday at the office we were discussing the possibility of the UK leaving the European Union. Some time ago, we actually wrote on our company blog about what Brexit would mean for European workers. But with all this Brexit discussion, we forget the UK is actually one of the oldest members of the European Union (1973).
Last night I was reading a headline in Business Insider about how Bernie Sanders just melted away a 30-point Hillary Clinton lead in a new poll related to the US presidential elections. Wikipedia has a useful article that tracks the different polls for both parties. The results of those polls are reported here on that page: Democratic Primaries.
It's true that the last poll conducted by Quinnipiac University shows a preference of: Clinton: 44% and Sanders: 42%, and with a 4.5% margin of error, they are virtually tied. There is even a newer one conducted by "Reuters/Ipsos" showing a similar trend: Clinton: 48% and Sanders: 45% (with a 5% margin of error).
It's fascinating to see how this candidate, without any of the infamous [super PACs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_action_committee#Super_PACs) behind him, has been able to attract so much attention and has become a real contender in the US 2016 presidential elections.
