Rightist leads poll in president's race

The Washington Times
By Traci Carl
ASSOCIATED PRESS

"MEXICO CITY -- He wasn't expected to win his party's primary, let alone surge ahead in the latest poll for the presidency. But soft-spoken conservative Felipe Calderon has managed to overtake his charismatic left-wing opponent, and suddenly the campaign is looking like a roller coaster.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, until recently the front-runner, still has two months to regain the upper hand, but if Mr. Calderon wins on July 2, it would break a wave of leftist victories in Latin America and give Washington a close ally at a time of tense relations over shifting U.S. immigration policies.

Mr. Calderon was already slightly ahead in two newspaper polls. Then came a survey published Wednesday in the newspaper Reforma that showed him leading Mr. Lopez Obrador by 40 percent to 33 percent, with Roberto Madrazo of the Institutional Revolutionary Party at 22 percent. The nationwide survey of 2,100 persons, conducted April 28-30, had a margin of error of 2.3 percentage points." Read on.

This is good news. Let's hope Mr. Calderon can pull this off.