TIJUANA – Mexico’s presidential race arrived in earnest in Baja California this week with the visit of Enrique Peña Nieto, who met with thousands of supporters in Mexicali and filmed a TV spot in Tijuana.

The candidate is campaigning for his Institutional Revolutionary Party (known as PRI) to reclaim the presidency after two terms of opposition rule.

For months, the photogenic former governor of the State of Mexico has been comfortably ahead in the polls. But a series of widely publicized gaffes – including his inability to name a single book that had influenced his life – have taken their toll.

The polling firm Ipsos-Bimsa announced Tuesday on the national Radio Fórmula network that Peña Nieto’s popularity plummeted 18 percentage points since last fall.

In October, he was the preferred candidate of 54 per cent of likely voters. In the latest poll, concluded on Feb. 1, that figure had dropped to 36 per cent, although he’s still ahead of his two main rivals.

Meanwhile, the popularity of Josefina Vázquez Mota, newly elected candidate for the ruling National Action Party (PAN), increased from 15 to 24 per cent in the same time period.

The third candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, running again for the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), gained one percentage point, from 15 to 16 per cent.

The poll, conducted by the French research firm Ipsos-Bimsa among 1,000 likely voters nationwide, has a margin of error of 3.76 per cent.

According to local newscasts, Peña Nieto did not refer to the poll numbers in his swing through the state. On Tuesday he met with 8,000 volunteers in Mexicali who will form his campaign committees statewide. On Wednesday, he taped a political ad in the top section of colonia Libertad in Tijuana.

His chief rival, Vázquez Mota, won the PAN’s primary on Sunday, becoming in the first woman in Mexico to have a real chance of winning the presidency.

As expected, Peña Nieto devoted a lot of time in Baja California to attacking her party. He said PAN administrations have made bad decisions and that the state’s voters would once more back the PRI in the election on July 1.

Baja California is considered the birthplace of the modern-day PAN. In 1989, a candidate for that party, Ernesto Ruffo, became the first opposition candidate to win a governor’s office in six decades.

Today, the governor’s office remains in PAN hands though Baja California is no longer uniformly controlled by that party. Tijuana’s Mayor Carlos Bustamante is PRI member, as are the other four mayors of Baja California.

omar.millan@sandiegored.com