On October 18, 2020, Bolivia’s Movement Towards Socialism–Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the People (MAS-IPSP) party roared back into a majority at the ballot box, winning a solid 55.11% of the vote and nearly doubling its nearest rival, Carlos Mesa’s Citizen Community (CC)’s 28.83%. The presidential ticket of Luis Arce Catacora and David Choquehuanca easily surpassed the simple-majority threshold for avoiding a runoff vote, and had an ample 26.28% margin of victory. Their victory came just 364 days after the disappointing performance of Evo Morales, who garnered 47.08% with a 10.57% margin over Mesa. It is all the more impressive since Arce and Choquehuanca campaigned without the benefits of incumbency and under the cloud of political persecution imposed by the temporary government of far-right interim president Jeanine Áñez.

This post takes a quantitative look at which parties gained and lost votes between these two elections and how the MAS-IPSP majority has evolved in size and geography since 2005. In the past year, the most consequential shift was missed by the headlines: the collapse in support for third-party candidate Chi Hyun Chung. I will also consider what these shifts reveal about Evo Morales’ second-round chances in 2019 (much better than expected), and Carlos Mesa’s fateful decision not to negotiate a prompt second round. A year ago, I looked at where and how Evo Morales lost his majority in 2016 and 2019; in the final section, I extend that analysis and see where Arce and Choquehuanca gained back supporters.

I draw on a statistical analysis of votes shifts by Diego Aliaga and colleagues, municipality-level vote analysis by Arián Laguna, citing and sometimes questioning their conclusions, and vote data from the Plurinational Election Organ (2019|2020). The analysis from 2019 to 2020 is simplified by the fact that nearly equal numbers of valid votes were cast in the two elections, meaning that we can work with raw vote counts as well as vote shares.

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