Spain's campaign opens with the right ahead. What would it take for Sánchez to survive?
Every private poll has the PP first and the PP and Vox together past the 176 line. The Socialists need a recovery bigger than any Spanish election has produced in the last two weeks of a campaign, or a polling miss bigger than 2004's.
Polling Forecast
3 min read
data as of 11 November Written in house from our poll data and our forecast.
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Spain's official campaign starts at midnight on Thursday, and Pedro Sánchez begins it further behind than at any point since he called the election. On our numbers the PP would win 133 seats on 31.3% of the vote, the PSOE 113 on 26.8% and Vox 66 on 19.1%. Together the PP and Vox have 199 seats, 23 more than a majority, and they reach 176 in more than 99% of our simulations.
That is not one pollster's view. Eleven days into November, every private poll has the PP first, and every one has the PP and Vox together over the line.
How the race got here
Sánchez called the election on 5 October, three days after Congress voted down his housing plan with the PP, Vox and Junts voting together. The bet was that a fight over housing, in the middle of the autumn's housing protests, would mobilise the left. For three weeks it looked like it might: the gap between the two big parties narrowed in almost every poll, and in our average it fell below four points.
Then, on 28 October, a train collision near Urda, in Toledo, killed 69 people, nine months after the Adamuz crash. Transport is a Socialist ministry. Óscar Puente resigned as minister on 3 November and took his name off the PSOE's lists; Carlos Cuerpo, already running the economy, took over Transport as well (Euronews). The PSOE has turned the resignation into a campaign line, "not all of us are equal", and Sánchez has started pointing to the Democrats' midterm wins in the United States as proof that the far right can be beaten; the same thing, he wrote, "will soon happen in Spain" (Demócrata).
The polls since then have not moved his way. Sigma Dos for El Mundo, the largest private survey of the campaign so far with 4,172 interviews over 30 October to 6 November, has the PP on 31%, the PSOE 25.2% and Vox 19.4%: 199 seats for the PP and Vox together. It also has Sánchez's personal rating at 3.1 out of 10, his lowest since the dissolution (Qué!).
The three ways it could still change
A late Socialist surge. In 2023 the final polls had the PP well clear, and the PSOE finished just 1.3 points behind it. It would need to do better than that now. On today's polls the PP and Vox have 23 seats to spare; to lose them, the right would have to drop something like three or four points between them, all of it to the left, in a fortnight.
The polls are wrong. Spanish private polls have understated the PSOE at six of the last eight general elections. We replayed every one of those misses on today's numbers. Only a repeat of 2004, when the polls missed the Socialists by the most, brings the PP and Vox close to losing their majority, and even then they keep 177 seats.
The debates. Only one is confirmed: an economy and housing debate on laSexta on Friday, with Carlos Cuerpo for the PSOE, Juan Bravo for the PP, José María Figaredo for Vox and Pablo Bustinduy for the Frente Amplio. Mediaset wants a Sánchez-Feijóo head-to-head on 16 November and RTVE on the 17th; Atresmedia has a four-way debate pencilled in for the 23rd, which Alberto Núñez Feijóo, Santiago Abascal and Ada Colau have accepted. Sánchez has not (Demócrata). A Prime Minister who is behind usually wants debates more than the challenger does; this time it is the other way round.
The question that matters more
If the PP and Vox have their majority, the real contest of the next two weeks is between them. A PP on 150 seats could try to govern alone with Vox's votes from outside. A PP on 133 with Vox on 66 cannot: Vox would be in a position to ask for ministries, and Abascal has every reason to. That is what the PP's slogan, "El cambio necesario", is trying to head off: a call to vote for change through the PP, not around it.
So watch two numbers, not one. The gap between the PP and the PSOE tells you whether Sánchez survives. The gap between the PP and Vox tells you what kind of government replaces him.
Our forecast updates with every new poll until polling day on 29 November. Spanish law stops Spanish media publishing polls from 24 November; our model keeps reading every poll that is released.
Polling Forecast reads every poll in ten countries, corrects for how pollsters have missed before, and turns them into seats. Our forecasts, the polls and our methods are free to explore.
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