Brazil is gearing up for general elections. In October, voters will choose a president, all 513 members of the House, two-thirds of the Senate — 54 seats — as well as governors in each of Brazil’s 27 states and their respective state legislatures. As things stand, the main contenders are President Lula, who is seeking a fourth non-consecutive term for the left-wing Workers’ Party (PT), and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, running for the far-right Liberal Party (PL). Until a few months ago, the race looked a lot more comfortable for Lula. He had the power of the public purse on his side, while his main rival Jair Bolsonaro was in jail for attempting a coup. And it was far from guaranteed that Bolsonaro would be able to transfer all his votes to his son, especially as a sizable share of the conservative electorate seemed to be losing its appetite for the institutional instability associated with the far right. But in Brazil, things can change overnight. And that’s exactly what happened. Amid corruption allegations affecting the entire length of the political spectrum — in the case of the Banco Master and INSS scandals — the president’s pre-campaign appears to have been hit the hardest so far, and Lula is seeing Flávio Bolsonaro eating into his lead and perhaps getting too close for comfort. In such a turbulent scenario, one might think there’s no analysis that can really stand the test of the waves. But it’s precisely at moments like these that knowing how to navigate the waters of Brazil’s election matters most. To help us understand what to watch in the polls and how to interpret them, our guests are: Márcia Cavallari, cluster director at Ipsos-Ipec, one of the leading public opinion polling firms operating in Brazil, and vice president of the Brazilian Association of Research Companies. She’s a statistician with a master’s degree in Political Science from the University of Connecticut, and 40 years of experience leading polling and data analysis, including election-focused research. She is also a member of the World Association for Public Opinion Research and of ESOMAR, an international association of research and insights professionals. Oswaldo Amaral, a political science professor at the University of Campinas and researcher at its Center for Public Opinion Studies, which he directed from 2017 to 2024. He holds a PhD in political science and has been a visiting researcher at the universities of Oxford, Notre Dame, and the Sorbonne, as well as a visiting professor at the University of Salamanca.
