Three days before the elections, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) leads the race with 50% of the valid votes, which keeps the possibility of winning in the first round open. Seeking reelection, Jair Bolsonaro (PL) has 36%, followed by Ciro Gomes (PDT), with 6%, and Simone Tebet (MDB), with 5%.
This is what the latest Datafolha survey reveals, which surveyed 6,800 people in 332 cities from Tuesday (27) to this Thursday (29). She was commissioned by Sheet and by TV Globo and registered under the number BR-09479/2022 at the Superior Electoral Court.
The margin of error is plus or minus two percentage points.
The institute starts to disclose the result of valid votes, which excludes blank, null and undecided votes from the intention account, as this is the criterion used by the TSE to count the result of the election.
Thus, it remains on the threshold of victory in the first round, which demands 50% of the valid voters plus at least one vote, in a wave of recovery: it reached 54% in May, falling to 48% in September, a level it remained until the last week when it fluctuated to 50%. In other words, the situation is stable.
The PT campaign intensified its search for votes, particularly for Ciro, whose energetic reaction against the offensive resulted in a statement to the nation on Monday (27), when he said he would not leave the race. He was not heard much by voters: in this survey, he fluctuated negatively compared to last week.
Senator Tebet, in turn, remained stable, proving that, if the campaign did not bring her a viable candidacy, at least it showed her to be stainless at her level. Datafolha had shown that 1 in 5 voters for her and Ciro were willing to vote for Lula.
The results make this Thursday’s debate on TV Globo even more important for Lula and for Bolsonaro, the last major event of the campaign.
Any more serious slip can get in the way; draws or wins on points are what is usually expected from these encounters, whose mystique is somewhat exaggerated in the political chronicle.
In fact, Lula’s absence from the SBT meeting last Saturday (24th) in no way affected his intention to vote. Just like Father Kelmon’s somewhat folksy introduction to the social media world, it didn’t help the PTB candidate, who didn’t score.
A bigger problem for the PT is the issue of abstention, which traditionally affects more low-income voters who make up Lula’s strength in this campaign. There is no way to predict this rate, given the unpredictability of factors, and according to Datafolha had found out last week, 3% of voters admitted not going to the polls.
The fact is that this is an election defined in the details, with no dramatic variations in the overall numbers. With the vote crystallized by the majority of voters for more than a month, everything suggests that the free advertising had little impact on the upcoming result – all four main candidates increased the tone of the attacks on each other, with Bolsonaro daily calling Lula a thief.
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