Polls can be unreliable but this news is truly radical:

Goldman Sachs, in its daily emerging market report, says:

Grupo GEA Reports Calder????n Ahead of AMLO in the polls

According to GEA (a consulting firm), in a poll conducted between March 18 and 21, Felipe Calder????n (PAN) overtook AMLO in the opinion polls. According to GEA, Calderon rose to first with 36% from 32% (in February); while AMLO fell to second to 34% from 41% in February. Madrazo remained in third with 28% (up 1%).

According to El Universal, AMLO said that these polls showing him down reflect the desperation and the dirty media war against him, because the PAN and the establishment are afraid of him. According to InfoSel, AMLO told the press that local bankers had become “parasites”, adding that he will only talk to them when he becomes President, so as to clarify a few things.

Calderon rose in the polls exactly after the conservative PAN Party ran newspaper* campaign ads showing great big vulgar pictures of Hugo Chavez making sneering remarks about President Vicente Fox shortly after the Summit of the Americas in Argentina. The obnoxiousness, the uncouth talk about lapdogs, and the disrespectful behavior of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez was apparently enough to affect Mexican voter sentiment – boosting the anti-Chavez right – as Mexican voters decided they had no intention of being pushed around.

If this poll is accurate, Hugo Chavez may well have swung Mexico to the right, in exactly the opposite result of what Chavez and his pal in Havana had intended for July 2’s elections. The irony is delicious!

UPDATE: Via Glenn, I notice that Dick Morris is warning of the delicate situation in Mexico ahead of its elections, and its connection to our ongoing U.S. immigration debate. Morris admits he’s consulted for the Calderon PAN Party. Could it be that those highly effective Chavez ads were something that came from his mind? Somehow it does have the brilliance of Dick Morris if you ask me!

*CORRECTION: Television, not newspaper, ads. Reader Pedro Pel????ez in Mexico (in comment 9) offers the following description of what happened:

I live in Mexico. The effectiveness of the ads is that they ran ON TELEVISION, not on the press. Thus, we could see Chavez speaking, and L????pez Obrador speaking, and the link between the two is so obvious that those ads hurt L????pez quite a bit. And the ads run only for about a week. Obviously the leftist PRD Partido de la Revoluci????n Democr????tica, was climbing the walls about the ads. That????????s why the PAN Partido de Acci????n Nacional obliged and withdrew them after a week on the air. But some harm was already done.

UPDATE: El Universal is reporting that the same sort of television ads, comparing far-left Ollanta Humala, with Hugo Chavez, are now being done in Peru’s hotly contested presidental election, the first round of which is this Sunday. The story is here.