2023 Argentine General Election: Is it really too close to call?

The Argentine presidential runoff takes place on Sunday evening, with the markets currently rating the election too-close-to-call. Sergio Massa of the Union for the Homeland coalition (a successor to the coalition which won the 2019 election) is given a 50% chance of winning, with the remaining 50% made up by Javier Milei, a far-right maverick of the Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump ilk.

Most polls put Milei’s coalition ahead in the first round, but Massa unexpectedly went on to win by 7 points, racking up 37% of the vote. In the two weeks that followed, Massa reached a record high 70% chance to win the runoff, but the market has since narrowed to a rare 50-50 tie going into election week. The race is considered so close that the market has flipped nearly ten times this month alone.

Taking an average of the latest second-round polls from each pollster, Milei leads by about 1.5 points, so there really isn’t much in it. It would be easy to assume that Massa will overcome this small polling gap given his first round overperformance, but I think such an assumption would be a mistake.

Since the first round, the pollsters seem to have flipped on their heads. Those who got closest to the Massa victory in the first round are now mostly showing Milei ahead, whereas the worst-performing pollsters are more of a mixed bag. In fact, all six of the top performing pollsters have recorded above-average leads for the far-right candidate in their latest surveys, ranging from 2.6 to 4.2 points.

Given the state of the polls, it appears as though Milei has the upper hand and ought to be the favourite to win. Anything longer than around 1.8 looks like good value.