Mexico’s election offers tough lessons for the Biden campaign

On June 2, Mexico concluded its largest-ever election, choosing a new president, both houses of Congress, nine governorships and numerous state and local positions. 

Claudia Sheinbaum, the candidate for incumbent president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s Morena party, won nearly 60 percent of the vote, double that of the main opposition candidate, Sen. Xochitl Galvez of the Strength and Heart for Mexico coalition. 

In Congress, Morena and its partners, having won the necessary two-thirds majority in the lower house, will likely obtain the additional two Senate seats required for the same two-thirds majority to amend the Constitution and create an omnipotent executive with few checks on her power, at least for the next three, or possibly six, years.

Sheinbaum’s margin of victory, and her coattails in Congress and state-level races, can be attributed to several factors. 

Lopez Obrador remains extremely popular, as are the cash transfer programs implemented by his administration. Indeed, pre-election polls suggested that program beneficiaries favored Sheinbaum by roughly the same margin as the final results. 

Many analysts also cite voters’ continued rejection of the traditional parties that comprised the Galvez-led coalition. The candidates chosen to represent these parties at the congressional and state level were primarily long-known political figures associated with past administrations. 

Further, some argue that the opposition did not offer a compelling case for change or demonstrate that it had learned the lessons of its 2018 defeat at the hands of Lopez Obrador and his Morena party. 

One aspect of the opposition’s campaign may serve as a note of caution for the Biden campaign. Galvez and her supporters argued that Sheinbaum’s election would threaten Mexico’s hard-fought and still young democracy. 

They cited the constitutional reform package presented by Lopez Obrador to the Congress in February that, had it been adopted, would largely eliminate independent agencies, reduce the size of the Congress by eliminating seats allocated through proportional representation and institute the direct election of Supreme Court justices, among other proposals. 

The campaign also cited Lopez Obrador’s prior attacks on the National Electoral Institute (INE) and his criticism of the president of the Supreme Court for her defense of judicial independence.  

Morena’s leadership announced, shortly after the election, that they will capitalize on their two-thirds majority to pass these reforms when the new Congress convenes in September, one month before Lopez Obrador’s term ends. Many independent analysts concur that, if adopted, these measures would represent a return to something akin to the 70 years of one-party rule in Mexico when the president was nearly omnipotent. 

Despite aggressively raising these concerns across Mexico (and during visits to the U.S.), Galvez lost in every state save one and in every demographic group aside from college-educated adults and business owners. It would not be a stretch to suggest that the economic interests of voters (especially the cash transfers) trumped the defense of institutions.

Why is this relevant to the United States and the Biden campaign, in particular? The Biden campaign argues that the presumed Republican nominee, Donald Trump, represents the biggest threat to U.S. democracy. 

They cite the Jan. 6, 2021, effort to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election, Trump’s promises to use the judiciary to seek revenge on political opponents and Trump’s claims that the president has total immunity from criminal prosecution while in office, among other issues, to argue that he is unfit for office. Many Democratic candidates also repeat these charges and argue that their electoral success is the only way to defend American democracy. 

The comparison is not about the accuracy of these claims, but about how American voters may respond. The Mexican results may provide a predictive tool. 

Recent polls show that over 50 percent of Americans believe that the United States is in a recession for which they blame Biden, roughly two-thirds say they are living paycheck-to-paycheck, 49 percent believe that the stock market is down, and the number of Americans who say they are “doing ok financially” hit a four-year low. 

Though there is plenty of data to counter these perceptions of the economy, the polls have remained steady regarding economic or “pocketbook” issues. Donald Trump’s recent conviction in New York for falsifying business records has thus far had limited impact on polling. This may suggest that U.S. voters’ decisions, like their Mexican counterparts, will be based on perceptions of their own economic situation and not on the somewhat abstract concept of defense of institutions or threats to democracy. 

The lesson from the Galvez campaign for the Biden campaign may be that it is hard to base a campaign on ideals in the face of economic hardships, whether real or imagined.

Andrew I. Rudman is the former director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.