The PP was leading the polls in 2008 ? How comes ? 
yes, they were tied until the month before the elections. but the impression was that PP was underpoilling. I remember a majority of people thought rajoy would win by a close margin until the presidential debates, where zapatero crushed rajoy.
Weird, at the time I had the impression that Zapatero was safe. Of course medias often suck when it's about commenting a foreign election, but still, the feeling was that PSOE was going to win easily.
Here we thought the election would be very close... and as we know, every PP supporter votes on election day. the problem is that lots of socialists stay at home. zapatero would have lost if nationalists in catalunya and basque country hadn't voted for him (people were really afraid of a PP government).
But what I ask myself is why ? Wasn't everything going fine in Spain at that point ?
the thing is that zapatero won in 2004 because of the irak war. many conservative people voted PSOE only to punish Aznar. remember than aznar won in a huge landslide in 2000. zapatero lost that vote of punishment, so we thought rajoy could win.. but then, nationalists and communists helped us and zapatero was reelected. never before a president had received 11 million votes here.
Zapatero won in 2004 because Aznar rushed to give an "explanation" for the Madrid suicide bombs: ETA, ETA, ETA !
He lied and he lost.
But till almost the end, unless my memory is bad, the PP had a plurality in opinion polls.
Of course, the PP had lost ground because of Iraq and of Rajoy's personality, but it was still ahead, if I remember correctly.
Since the end of the 1990s, the 2 blocks were almost equal, even in 2008 while the PSOE was "successful" and PP was falling asleep with Rajoy.
That's only recently that a wider gap has opened.
