Putin Is Certain to Win Re-election, but His Support May Be Slipping

NIZHNY NOVGOROD, Russia — With the hours slipping away until Russia’s presidential election on Sunday, Valentina A. Aristova, a Communist Party die-hard in the northern city of Nizhny Novgorod, rose before sunrise to hand out campaign literature at a Volga River shipyard.

Bundled in a dark fur coat and hat, Aristova, a matronly English teacher, reflected on the two twists in what is expected to be a romp by President Vladimir Putin to a fourth presidential term.

First, support for Putin in large cities has been uneven or even declining in favor of Pavel Grudinin, a wealthy farmer turned Communist Party candidate, despite state television coverage of Putin bordering on a personality cult.

“People come home, they turn on the TV and they are told who is the most important person, who is the best person,” said Aristova, who has worked on Communist Party campaigns for 27 years.

Second, even with the Kremlin’s laser focus on turnout as a mandate for Putin, efforts to ensure participation have not altered widespread expectations for a mediocre showing given the lack of mystery.

“Putin fears being shamed before the whole world if the turnout is below the baseboard,” said Aristova, who like many election veterans expects turnout in major cities to be about 50 percent, far below the 60 to 70 percent a presidential race usually attracts.

In general, the quality of Russian polling is low, marred by the propensity of respondents to anticipate what the pollster wants to hear. Government polls amplify that distortion, and the Kremlin has silenced independent national pollsters. Nevertheless, analysts say that over time they provide a measure of the trend of opinion.

The newspaper Vedomosti caused a minor stir in early March by noting that Putin’s ratings in Moscow and St. Petersburg had dropped 12 percentage points between mid-January and mid-February, to about 57 percent.

The state-controlled pollster, the Russian Public Opinion Research Center, claimed the newspaper was using the wrong data, and doubled down on its prediction that Putin would get about 70 percent of the vote with a turnout of around 70 percent.

Grudinin would have a shot in a fair race, Aristova said. She then reeled off a list of dirty tricks she has seen in past elections, including an unannounced polling station in a sprawling local cemetery. “Dead people selected the government,” she added.

Local pollsters in major cities like Nizhny Novgorod have tried to fill the gap left by the absence of reliable national polls.

Maksim S. Lubyanoy, a sociologist, set up an independent polling organization last year called the Scientific Research Institute of Social Management Problems. Its weekly polls in Nizhny Novgorod, based on street interviews with 1,200 people, have shown in recent months a steady drop in support for Putin, a corresponding rise for Grudinin and fewer people committed to voting.

Those who said they would definitely vote has dropped to 19.9 percent, from a high of 23.5 percent in mid-January. The percentage of those saying they are likely to vote has risen to 44.4 percent from 27.9 percent in the same period.

Support for Putin in those two categories combined has dropped to 38.6 percent, from a high of 52.9 percent in February. Grudinin has shown steady growth, to 26.4 percent from 14.2 percent in January.

Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, an ultranationalist firebrand and perennial presidential candidate, was in third place, around 16.5 percent. The other five candidates are all polling around 3 percent or less. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.68 percent.

Grudinin, 57, is the director of the Lenin State Farm, a former Soviet collective on Moscow’s southern outskirts that has become a successful real estate and farming enterprise famous for strawberries. Although not a member of the Communist Party, he has embraced its trademark positions, like free education, price controls and the nationalizing of strategic industries now owned by oligarchs.

At first, state-run television embraced Grudinin as the fresh face of the Communist Party. Some political analysts suggested that the Kremlin had approved his candidacy, succeeding Gennadi A. Zyuganov, the longtime party leader, as a way to lift turnout.

But as soon as Grudinin began to woo away Putin voters, he disappeared from state television except for a smear campaign. However, blackballing Grudinin seems to have dampened interest in the campaign, working against the Kremlin’s desire for higher turnout. The voters “are irritated about the electoral process,” said Lubyanoy, including Putin’s assured win.

While hardly a Kremlin critic like Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption campaigner barred from running for president, Grudinin seems to be generating an appreciable protest vote.

Although some voters have been turned off by his vocal admiration for Stalin or his hard-line positions like resurrecting capital punishment, analysts said, his successful record in business lends credence to his promises to fix Russia’s long-ailing economy.

Oksana Kuznitskaya, 26, an office manager, attended a weekend rally for Grudinin in central Moscow. “People are tired of one person ruling for so long,” she said of Putin, adding that a big number for Grudinin “would show Putin and his friends that they are doing something wrong.”

Support for Grudinin beyond the communist core is rooted in similar sentiments, Lubyanoy said. “There is a parallel between those who want to protest legally for change and those who will vote for Grudinin.” Putin has barely bothered to campaign. Not by accident, one of his last stops this week was in Crimea. The 2014 annexation of the Black Sea peninsula was wildly popular, and Election Day was moved to March 18, the fourth anniversary.

The president’s tough-guy approach has recently been telegraphed in other ways — even, some have suggested, in the accusation that the Kremlin poisoned a former Russian double agent in Britain. But other analysts suggested that did not resonate much with voters.

Putin kicked off the official campaign season three months ago in Nizhny Novgorod with a rally at the giant GAZ vehicle factory — a symbol of the city’s past industrial might, but no longer the engine of its economy.

As workers headed into the first shift last Wednesday, they scurried past two giant Soviet mosaics celebrating their efforts as the rays of the rising sun glinted off scattered gold squares.

Alexander Kutyaev, 49, a 20-year-veteran of the factory, supports Putin. He lived through the 1990s, he said, when he was reduced to eating moldy potatoes because the factory stopped paying wages.

“I don’t really see an alternative to Putin,” he said, “I think most people will vote for him. There is stability in this country under him. I don’t want to go back to the 1990s.”

Another autoworker, Yelena Tyurina, said she had also looked for an alternative, but had yet to find one. She said she was considering voting for Ksenia Sobchak, a journalist and former reality-television star who is the daughter of Putin’s political mentor. Tyurina said she wanted to support the idea of women in politics.

A third autoworker, identifying himself only as Y. Fadeyev, 41, said that he would not vote, although Grudinin had added some “intrigue” to the race. “The rest are simply clowns,” Fadaev said. “I am not going to vote because the result is already known.”