The only valid survey is the one offered by the ballot boxes. This statement is a cliché but it responds to the harsh reality: some of the factors that can condition the vote during election day perhaps did not exist days before, when the polls were carried out; and others, who seemed to weigh decisively before the elections, may arrive deactivated at the appointment with the polls. That is why it is so difficult to calculate the electoral impact of the order that Pedro Sánchez has launched with his possible resignation. Time could magnify its effects or dilute them. The only certainty is that if the elections were held right now, the chances of seeing a high level of mobilization would increase and, with it, a deployment of the potential vote of both blocs: the conservative and the progressive.
The unknown posed by this hypothetical scenario focuses on the magnitude of the respective potential vote; That is, what is the electoral ceiling of each block today? And although the 23-J elections were agonizing in nature, they do not provide enough clues to answer that question. Firstly, because the participation was modest (just three tenths above the 66.2% that was registered in the November 2019 electoral repetition, marked by a noticeable growth in abstention). Hence, despite the good results of the PP, the conservative bloc was still somewhat below its electoral ceiling of April four years ago last July.
However, it was the progressive bloc that lost the most voters on 23-J into the depths of abstention. Specifically, if the comparison is made with the electoral ceiling of the left in the last decade (11,684,809 votes in the 2015 elections), the progressive space would have lost more than 800,000 ballots in July 2023.
Now, the left has never again repeated the result of 2015 while the right (which obtained one of its worst records in that call) has since added between a quarter of a million and more than 300,000 voters. And in the event that these new conservative voters came from the left, then the ceiling of the progressive bloc would have to be lowered by that same figure, until it was slightly below that of April 2019 (when it approached 11 million and a half of ballots).
From there, a participation close to that of the spring five years ago (around 70%) would mean the injection of a million voters to the contingent that went to the polls in July 2023 (almost 25 million). And that figure would cover the electoral ceiling of the right (up to 11,325,029 ballots), but also that of the left (up to a similar figure). And there would still be a remainder of voters that basically correspond to the losses of the Catalan independence movement between 2019 and 2023 (although a part of them, around 200,000, would have already opted for the socialist useful vote in the general elections, and of (therefore, the current ceiling of the left can be slightly above its 2019 result, until it exceeds 11 and a half million voters).
In this scenario (see attached graphs), the intra-block distribution of the increase in the vote could entirely favor the PP in the case of the right and be awarded a correlation of 7 to 3 between the PSOE and Sumar, in the space on the left. With the rest of the political formations in records similar to those of 23-J and a participation of 70%, PP and PSOE would sign a tie around 31% of the vote, while Sumar would gain a very slight advantage over Vox (of just over half point). As a whole, the progressive bloc would prevail in votes (although the difference would not go beyond 200,000 ballots), while the popular and ultras would obtain some seats (between three and four) more than the left.
Naturally, this hypothesis is based on a circumstance whose impact could fade in a few weeks. And at the same time, it could also happen that the president’s plan kept the conservative electorate hypermobilized and, on the other hand, failed to bring out of apathy that ‘sleeping’ electorate that only votes to the left in exceptional situations. Without ruling out that, in this case, abstention is actually functioning as a provisional refuge for voters in transit towards other partisan or ideological loyalties.
