Dear reader,
Yesterday was not your regular Sunday. Brazilians nationwide went to the polls, as the entire country waited in anticipation to find out who would become their president for the next four years. The questions on everyone’s mind were: would former leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva manage to come out victorious? Or would far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who had shown surprising resilience in the polls, succeed in getting himself reelected?
Now that we know the results, we’d like to talk about the elections themselves. Indeed, this year’s presidential race was quite different from previous ones, which can probably be explained by the Brazilian context of economic recession, political polarization, and violence. So here we decided to unpick three of the main facts that made these elections one of Brazil’s most unique.
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Best regards,
The Brazilian Report team
This is the first time a Brazilian president is not reelected
Although Bolsonaro’s performance in the final count contrasted with most polling institutions’ projections (we’ll talk about this later), Lula still came out victorious, albeit by a whisker – gathering 50.9% of the votes. That means that this is the first time in the history of Brazilian democracy that a president has failed at their attempt for reelection.
Another interesting point is that this is also the first time a former president ran against the incumbent, with both probably being the two most experienced candidates in the overall race.
“Lula vs. Bolsonaro”: the most searched questions on Google during the second round of the elections
According to data from Google Trends, the most searched question related to the elections yesterday was “who is the new president of Brazil” (“quem é o novo presidente do Brasil”). Searches about Lula and Bolsonaro were pretty balanced, although searches about Lula surged after 7 PM on Sunday, when most media outlets announced his win. Interestingly, in the last seven days, the searches for each candidate averaged at 50% each, a reflection of how tight the race was.
It’s interesting to see how, since the first round, for most Brazilians the race was clearly drawn exclusively between the two frontrunning candidates. During our warm-up livestream on Friday, our reporter Cêde Silva joked that Sunday will be Brazil’s “third round” of the elections. According to him, for many Lula-supporting voters the first round was a fight to get their candidate elected without the need for a runoff. In this sense, for many the first round was a fight between just two candidates, much like the second round traditionally is. See how Cedê explains it and watch the full livestream here!
Most poll projections vastly underestimated Bolsonaro in the first round
After the first-round results on October 2, Bolsonaro declared that he “beat the lie” of the polling institutes, as he performed much better in the final count than anticipated. Indeed, some differences were astounding: institutions such as Ipec, Datafolha and Ipespe, had given Bolsonaro around 36% of the votes in their final pre-election polls, a seven percentage-point mistake as the president ended up getting over 43% of the vote. Most institutions were pretty accurate in measuring Lula’s performance though.
So why did these institutions fail to capture the size of Bolsonaro’s supporters? The Brazilian Report interviewed Andrei Roman, CEO of Atlas Intel, one of the institutions that got a pretty accurate prediction of Bolsonaro’s performance in the first round. One of the key aspects of Atlas Intel’s analysis is the importance given to online polls. Andrei explains their accuracy by speaking of cars:
“The surveys are carried out with people on the streets, and the richest don’t walk on the street, they use cars. This group is underrepresented if the numbers are not properly weighted.”
Did you know that Andrei Roman was a part of our livestream yesterday? He even made the honors of calling Lula’s victory live! Check out more information below!
🤩 The event of the year: our livestream!
We were extremely happy to see so many amazing supporters tuning into our stream yesterday! We were also so honored to have received so many coffees from our supporters, we are glad our content was helpful for so many of you. And for all that support, our genuine THANK YOU!
We had many amazing guests, such as Mario Sérgio Lima, Sérgio Praça and Andrei Roman talking about everything happening during the vote count. We really recommend rewatching it!
🎥 REWATCH HERE 👇