Either we criticize them all, or we throw the stove in the river.

It's not that the polls are wrong: it's that people vote badly. I imagine that, the day after the election, the various pollsters in the press paraphrase Mario Vargas Llosa to justify their deviations, pardon the double entendre. A classic tactic is to attack the CIS (Center for Sociological Research) and immediately add the label "Tezanos's," as if the other polls weren't also manipulated and subject to the potential interference of whoever pays for them. In fact, in the case of Extremadura, the CIS doesn't fare particularly badly. The website Electomanía calculates a blunder index based on the sum of deviations between the number of seats attributed and reality, plus the points of error in their voting intention. Thus, the government poll totaled 15.5 points of deviation but was the sixth most accurate, ahead of those published, for example, in The Country (20.2 units) or The reason (A spectacular 25.2% deviation: the poor fairground worker lost an eye with the pellet gun). In the case of the Planeta newspaper, it turns out they didn't even predict the Socialist Party's drubbing, attributing 33.1% of the vote to them, when it was actually 25.7%. In the end, the public opinion poll predicted the number of seats that have come to pass for the PSOE, PP, and Podemos parties, with Vox being the only exception. The Country, heABC either The Spanish Four out of four failed.

I don't mean to imply that the CIS survey is pure and pristine: where there's manipulation, there's the possibility that an unscrupulous hand could alter the results with a pinch of salt. And it would be naive to believe that only Tezanos is pulling the strings. As my good friend Buff—a canine companion who passed away on Sunday—used to say, with his wise, pundit-like bark, about this tendency of the press to criticize the CIS's shortcomings (with apologies again) without seeing the beam in their own eye: "Dog doesn't eat dog... unless it's a public dog."