After a trend in recent years of underestimating voter support for Brexit and Donald Trump, opinion polls in Brazil for Sunday’s first round of presidential elections were far off the mark.
Incumbent Jair Bolsonaro and many of his far-right allies fared much better than pollsters had predicted, surprising analysts and shocking supporters of his left-wing rival Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
“The biggest loser (of Sunday’s election) is all the polls,” Latin America analyst Michael Shifter of think tank Inter-American Dialogue told AFP.
– What were the poll predictions? –
Lula garnered 48 percent of Sunday’s votes — within plus or minus two percentage points of error incorporated by pollsters Datafolha and Ipec.
Both had put Lula within reach of winning the election on the first ballot – with a prediction of 50 percent of the valid votes cast by Datafolha and 51 percent by Ipec.
Bolsonaro’s result came entirely from left field. He managed 43 percent of the vote, compared to 36 percent predicted by Datafolha.
Instead of the predicted 14-point handicap, he was just five points, or about six million votes, behind Lula.
There was a similar trend among some of Bolsonaro’s right-wing allies.
Rio de Janeiro governor Claudio Castro won re-election on the first ballot with 58 percent of the vote, compared to polling expectations of 44 to 47 percent.
And in Sao Paulo, Tarcisio de Freitas led the race for the gubernatorial election with 42 percent – ??eleven points more than he had landed in the poll.
– What went wrong? –
Analysts are scratching their heads: Was it a last-minute Bolsonaro surge among undecided or oppositional voters, or have polling firms with hitherto reliable reputations somehow lost the ability to accurately predict voter intent?
“We don’t know if Bolsonaro made real progress or if he already had that support,” Leandro Gabiati, director of consultancy Dominium, told AFP.
According to Mayra Goulart of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, there has been an “information blackout” in Brazil due to a pandemic-related two-year delay in the census that takes place every 10 years.
This may have affected the accuracy of the pollsters’ population sample, particularly in influential segments such as evangelicals — a growing and right-wing segment of Brazilian society.
“It’s likely that the 2022 census will correct some of these inconsistencies for future elections,” said Guilherme Casaroes, political scientist at the Getulio Vargas Foundation.
– Consequences –
“It will definitely damage the credibility of the analysis” by the media and pundits like himself, said Leonardo Paz, Brazil adviser to think tank International Crisis Group.
“Right now it’s harder to do analysis because … the numbers aren’t credible anymore.”
The discrepancy between the forecast and Sunday’s result is a “big problem for the (electoral) institutes and democracy itself,” added Dominium’s Gabiati.
“Polls are an important part of the electoral process and it is terrible for democracy that this aspect is being questioned.”
Bolsonaro has long sought to cast doubt on the accuracy of polls he claims work for the left, and could now use this “evidence” to gauge anti-Lula sentiment ahead of the all-important June 30 runoff. to heat up further in October.
“We have defeated the lies of the opinion polls,” he said happily on Sunday.
For Goulart, this could strengthen the negationist discourse led by Bolsonaro.
“Challenging election polls in the context of far-right populism also means questioning science and reliable sources of information, including the media,” she said.
Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo, a congressman, said Monday he would collect signatures to launch an investigation by the parliamentary committee against polling firms over the discrepancies.
“Electoral authorities will have to reinvent themselves,” said Casaroes.
