Caracas Chronicles

On this blog, we’ve been fairly dismissive about the proliferation of Noticias24 clone sites: a desperately crowded bandwagon full of news aggregators doing the same thing as Noticias24.com, but badly. LaPatilla.com is, at first blush, just an also-ran in this sad parade. To its credit, though, The Watermelon does seem to be carving out a moderately useful niche for itself by leaking polls like there’s no tomorrow. 

This week, they have bits and bobs of Datanalisis’s June Omnibus poll. It’s less uniformly ominous for chavismo than that C21 poll La Patilla also leaked – for instance, it does show an improvement of about 7 points on the key "how is the country doing?" question relative to April. Even then, though, 62% of respondents think the country is doing badly.

One eye-popping result is that, for the first time ever in Datanalisis polling, the government gets a negative overall assessment in every single aspect of its performance. Results range from moderately negative on its handling of education (51% think it’s handling the issue badly to 47% who think it’s handling it well) to catastrophically horrible on its handling of Personal Safety (89% to 9%). Yikes. 

So, a hearty welcome to the leaky mo-fos over on LaPatilla…and may they have the fortitude to leak polls even when they’re not so gratifying to their core audience!