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Mexico City. Mexico’s drug war has cost 50,000 lives since President Felipe Calderon took office in December 2006, and when voters go to the polls to elect a new leader on July 1, that dreadful figure may cost his party the presidency.

Ever-expanding violence and insecurity have left many Mexicans desperate for a leader who can stem the killings and pacify the gangsters. But public frustration has not translated into a substantive policy debate.

Political analysts say whoever succeeds Calderon will probably continue fighting the cartels in similar fashion — by working closely with the United States and relying heavily on the Mexican military.

“The majority of Mexicans want a change in strategy, but it’s more of a gut feeling that they want something different than a clear sense of what to do,” pollster Jorge Buendia said.

When pressed for specifics, the candidates tend to offer airy platitudes instead of taking on the tough issues.

Even the candidate projected to benefit most from Calderon’s struggles — Enrique Pena Nieto, nominee of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI — has avoided staking out firm positions on security issues.

The presidential vote is set for July 1, but Mexico’s campaign season will not be in full swing until next month, Still, for all practical purposes, a three-way presidential contest is well under way.

The PRI has placed its hopes for a comeback on Pena Nieto, the telegenic former governor of the state of Mexico, the country’s most populous. For months he has held a double-digit lead over potential rivals in polls, but his momentum has been slowed by stumbles and insinuations from opponents that his party w ill go soft on the traffickers.

A Pena Nieto victory would return his party to an office it lost in 2000 after ruling for 71 years through an extensive network of patronage, corruption and Mexican-style machine politics. But Pena Nieto is not seen as a shoo-in.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the former Mexico City mayor, will run against him as the candidate of the left-leaning Revolutionary Democratic Party. Lopez Obrador lost to Calderon in 2006 by such a narrow margin that he refused to accept the results and spent more than a year calling himself “Mexico’s legitimate president.” He remains rock-star popular with many of Mexico’s poor.

More than any candidate in the race, Lopez Obrador has made an issue of the Mexican government’s drug war strategy. He promises to send the military back to its barracks within six months of taking office and to focus instead on the underlying social causes of rampant criminal violence.

Today about 50,000 Mexican soldiers and Marines, sporting full body armor and machine guns, patrol the country’s highways and urban neighborhoods. Despite allegations of human rights abuses, the Mexican military remains one of the country’s best-regarded institutions, analysts say, and in some places, it’s the only public security force standing between relative order and criminal chaos.

Because Mexican presidents are limited to a single, six-year term, Calderon is ineligible for re-election. His National Action Party (PAN) has nominated former education secretary Josefina Vazquez Mota, who pledges to press ahead with Calderon’s fight and to up the ante by threatening lifetime prison sentences for politicians and public officials caught working for the cartels.

But she, too, has repeatedly ducked requests for more detailed proposals, while running television advertisements warning voters against choosing politicians with ties to organized crime, a not-so-subtle dig at Pena Nieto.

Mexican campaign regulators have warned that this year’s election is more at risk of being tainted by dirty drug money than any previous contest.

Federal prosecutors announced on Jan. 31 that they were investigating former officials in the border state of Tamaulipas, including three former PRI governors. A few days earlier, an official from the PRI-controlled state of Veracruz was found carrying $1.9 million in cash at a Mexico City area airport, and the party’s opponents quickly alleged that the money was part of a secret campaign slush fund for Pena Nieto.

Still, analysts say Pena Nieto is so far ahead in the polls that there’s little incentive to lay out specific policy proposals at this stage, said George Grayson, a Mexico scholar at Virginia’s College of William & Mary.

“Pena Nieto is in a glide pattern right now,” Grayson said.

The Washington Post