The Surprising Math Behind Mexico's President Approval Ratings

How Mexico's President is building a coalition her party never imagined

It’s often assumed that President Claudia Sheinbaum’s supporters are essentially the same people who backed her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). Under this view, her popularity is simply inherited, built on the same political foundation he laid, perhaps consolidated further, but rooted in the same base.

So for this week’s essay at Mexico Decoded, I went looking for evidence of that.

I pulled approval data from three of Mexico’s most widely cited pollsters (Enkoll, Mitovsky, and El Financiero) and compared where each leader stood among 61 demographic and political groups: gender, age, occupation, home state, issue priorities, party identification, and 2024 vote choice. To put them on equal footing, I normalized their approval figures so the comparison is about the shape of their coalitions, not just their overall numbers. The baseline for AMLO is his final months in office (August–September 2024), and for Sheinbaum is her most recent readings (January–February 2026). I only flagged differences that are statistically significant.

What came back is not what the conventional wisdom would predict.