Breathe
By Jaina Pereyra
When I studied Political Science, many professors explained partisan voting with an analogy that referred to the attachment people have with their soccer team. If your parents were Pumas or Americanistas, if your family was chiva, if all your friends supported Cruz Azul, it was easy to explain that you would support the same team, regardless of its performance in the Liguilla or the hiring or selling of players. The same, they said, goes for the political party for which you traditionally vote.
At the time, the analogy seemed to make sense. Voters were, for the most part, "hardcore"; we voted by party. Elections were contested in threes and identities were well defined. Not even Vicente Fox's victory, which should have made us think more about other identities and less about partisan identity, made us doubt this explanation.
