Anti-establishment leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador poised to become Mexico's new president

Presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, an anti-establishment leftist, led by more than 20 points in the polls as Mexican voters turned out for a general election Sunday.

In June, Obrador called for a flood of immigrants to enter the U.S. to protest the border crisis and claim their "human right."

Why is he popular?

Obrador has captured voters’ interest by criticizing Mexico's corruption and the brutal violence perpetuated by drug cartels. Mexico had a record 25,000 murders last year, Yahoo News reported.

"We represent the possibility of real change," Obrador told hundreds of journalists crowded at the entrance of his polling station in Mexico City’s Thalpan district. He called the election "historic.”

"We are going to achieve a peaceful transformation, without violence,” Obrador said. “There is going to be an orderly but also deep change, because we are going to banish corruption, the main problem facing Mexico."

Many voters are reportedly sick of the nation’s two main political groups: the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the conservative National Action Party (PAN).

Obrador, 64, says the two parties are essentially the same "mafia of power," a message that has piqued the interest of many. However, the former Mexico city mayor has not outlined how he will implement changes.

Some see Obrador as a new champion for the poor.

"Everybody wants to see him. He's our new president," Salvador Sanchez, an 82-year-old voter reportedly said. “At last, a change. For the first time, history will be written on the side of the poor."

Other voters are not as enthusiastic.

Gustavo Felix, 56, said he had only hoped Lopez Obrador's coalition — led by his party, Morena — would not win a majority in Congress.

"If they do, we're going to be living in a dictatorship," Felix said in the report.

According to a poll by Oraculus, Lopez Obrador was favored by 48.1 percent of voters. That compares to 26.1 percent for former speaker of Congress and PAN candidate Ricardo Anaya and 20.8 percent for ex-finance minister Jose Antonio Meade of the PRI party. Independent candidate Jaime Rodriguez had five percent.

Why is the election 'historic?'

Obrador's coalition is also striving to win a congressional majority and six of the nine governorships on the ballot, Yahoo News reported.

If that happens, it will mark a “major shift in Mexican politics and a coup for a party launched only six years ago, originally as a grassroots movement to support Lopez Obrador's 2012 campaign,” Duncan Wood, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, told Yahoo News.

"You've got an openly left-wing economic nationalist who is from a new party, a party that didn't even exist at the last (national) election, who is managing to sweep into power, not just in the presidency, but in the Congress as well," Wood said.

"We're looking at a shift in Mexican politics," he explained.