Lead narrows for Chavez heir amid crime, shortages

[Zorro]

Nicolas Maduro hopes to ride a tide of grief into Venezuela's special presidential election Sunday and win voters' endorsement to succeed the late Hugo Chavez, the divisive larger-than-life leader who chose him to carry on the messy, unfinished Chavista revolution.

That will mean inheriting both a loyal following among the poor and multiple problems left behind by Chavez, troubles that have been harped on by opposition challenger Henrique Capriles.

Although he's still favored, Maduro's early big lead in opinion polls sharply narrowed in the past week as Venezuelans grappled with a litany of woes many blame on Chavez's mismanagement of the economy and infrastructure: chronic power outages, double-digit inflation, food and medicine shortages. Add to that rampant crime — Venezuela has among the world's highest homicide and kidnapping rates.

Maduro, a former union activist with close ties to Cuba's leaders who was Chavez's longtime foreign minister, hinted at feeling overwhelmed during his closing campaign speech to hundreds of thousands of red-shirted faithful Thursday.

http://news.yahoo.com/lead-narrows-chavez-heir-amid-crime-shortages-082144362.html

[DonViejo]

1. I've been following this...

article as it's developed from the first AP report yesterday. The original AP article reports Maduro is ahead by 10 points in the latest poll. He's ahead by 10 points but...blah, blah, the race has narrowed. Subsequent articles from other agencies have not reported the poll lead, just "the race has narrowed" angle. I guess if a poll goes from a 12 point lead to a 10 point, you could say the race has narrowed.

[Zorro]

2. Well yes that does mean that the race has "narrowed"

but I think the expectation remains that Manuro will win by approximately the same percentage margin as Hugo did last year.

[joshcryer]

3. Capriles went from 14.4 points behind to 9.7 points behind.

That's the only reason it's noteworthy.

edit: nevermind, that AP reporter has been with them awhile and appears to write a lot of anti-Chavez articles, I just assumed she was new because her twitter doesn't go back very far.