Although on the global scoreboard Rodolfo Hernández and Gustavo Petro are in a technical tie for the second presidential round, #LaGranEncuesta –carried out by the firm YanHaas– showed that the regions are very clear about which is their favorite. Antioquia, the Coffee Region and the departments in the center of the country go with Hernández, while Bogotá, the Pacific and the Caribbean opt for Petro.
The statistical measurement shows that Hernández is managing to endorse a large part of the electorate of the former mayor of Medellín Federico Gutiérrez, who in the first presidential round obtained just over 5 million votes.
As soon as Gutiérrez learned the results of the elections and realized that he was in third place, he gave his support to the former mayor of Bucaramanga, who became the bet of the “antipetristas”.
Since many of Gutiérrez’s voters are in Antioquia – he got 1.3 million votes in the department – Hernández is drinking from those waters to strengthen his electoral muscle in the region.
In Antioquia and the Coffee Region, the Santander candidate is 20 percentage points higher than his rival from the Historical Pact: the former has a voting intention of 49% and the latter 29%.
Hernández overlaps even more strongly in the central-eastern region, where he would obtain 56% of the vote and Petro 30%. This region has departments such as Cundinamarca, Boyacá, Santander, Tolima, Huila and Meta.
It was precisely this group of departments that leveraged the victory of the former mayor of Bucaramanga in the first presidential round on May 29. It is there that he got the votes that allowed him to escape from the lot, and now his challenge is to capitalize on that support.
In his native Santander, for example, he swept all the other candidates and got almost seven out of ten votes. In others, he had more modest votes, but still emerged victorious.
The Boyacá case was widely mentioned because the department’s strong figure was former Governor Carlos Amaya, who was supporting Sergio Fajardo. This, however, did not prevent Hernández from obtaining 51% of the Boyacá votes.
Pacific and Bogota: with Petro
The candidate of the Historical Pact is still strong in Bogotá, the city where he served as mayor between 2012 and 2015. There he got 47% of the votes on May 29.
#LaGranEncuesta shows that for the second round he has a voting intention of 49%, while Hernández has 31%.
Petro has strong electoral allies in Bogotá, such as the representative to the Chamber of the capital for the Alianza Verde party, Katherine Miranda, who became his head of debate. Miranda obtained more than 118,000 votes on March 13, which made her the candidate for the Chamber with the most votes in Bogotá and in the entire country.
In the Pacific it seems that Petro is going to win by knockout. By statistical measure, he is 41 percentage points ahead of his opponent in the Anti-Corruption Rulers League.
While Petro has a voting intention of 65%, the former mayor of Bucaramanga has only 24%.
The Caribbean is where things are tighter, although the electorate seems to prefer the former mayor of Bogotá to a greater extent. With Petro there would be 47% of the votes, while Hernández would have 36%.
As the numbers stand, it is key that campaigns choose carefully which departments they plan to visit, as there are only two weeks left before the elections.
