In October 2018, a few months after jumping to the leadership of the CIS from the leadership of the PSOE, where he served as Secretary of Studies and Programs, José Félix Tezanos put the bandage on all his future wounds: his surveys “do not intend to be right.”

Five years of self-fulfilling prophecy later, Tezanos resists his history of mistakes with a soldier's mentality. In the latest issue of the magazine Temas, which he uses to attack the “divinologists”, “hobby numerologists” and “occasional sociologists” who compete with him privately, the director of the CIS defines the public institution he presides as follows: “The last Gallic village of sociologists who continue to resist the supposed destiny of being politically devastated by an unbridled right.”

Tezanos wears the fact that its polls systematically deviate from the demographic consensus “set by the forces of the right” as a badge.. After the resounding failure of 28-M – it was estimated that the PSOE would win the municipal elections by more than 520,000 votes and ended up losing by 763,000 -, the official propaganda worked hard to point it out as the winner of 23-J. Although he was far from it, he did manage to be the only pollster who failed the order of the four main parties in the race.

Tezanos' CIS fails. A lot. But why? The citizens you ask exist, their answers are real. And, furthermore, the Sociological Research Center's barometers interview more people than any other private pollster.. So? The problem that Tezanos promotes, maintains and has no desire to correct is that the Spain that responds to the CIS is much more biased against the right than the one that later manifests itself at the polls.

Since he assumed the presidency of the organization, the CIS survey sample has been overrepresenting the left by about 11 points, if the voting memory of those who participate in the barometer is compared with the real results of the last elections.. And there is no purpose of amendment. In the barometer published last week, 43.5% of those who remembered having voted on June 23 did so for the PSOE or Sumar, very close to the real 44% in the elections.. But only 35.5% had voted for the PP or Vox, absolutely far from the real 45.44% of less than three months ago.. It is not a problem of memory, nor of shame. Even if the 7.1% who preferred not to answer that question were embarrassed right-wing voters, the sample would still be biased or full of liars. It has been like this for five years, and it will continue like this.

In addition to his obvious partisan connection, his statements, his errors, the formulation of ad hoc questions based on the Government's action or the controversial polls in the middle of the electoral campaign, the great war of Tezanos at the head of the CIS has been waged against the kitchen, the weighting tools that all demoscopic houses use to try to solve the sampling biases in which he persists on each occasion.

Since he arrived at the CIS, Tezanos defended that the only valid method was his, based on the raw response of vote + sympathy. Without additional calculations that, in his opinion, distorted the opinion of the interviewee. But the concatenation of gross errors, which began in Andalusia in 2018 and culminated in Madrid in 2021, where it attracted the attention of the international press, led it to introduce in 2022 the strikingly named Alaminos-Tezanos two-factor inertia-uncertainty model.

Under the intricate linguistic construction, Tezanos aspired to build a “robust and flexible” model together with its number two, which would eliminate “future prediction” by “measuring the present.”. The definitive bandage: CIS surveys are still photos that cannot fail. If they move away from the final reality, it will always be because the voter has changed his mind, and never because Tezanos trusts in a parallel political universe predisposed to respond at all times to what is best for the “Gallic village.”