Even though the pollsters are being questioned for underestimating Bolsonaro in the first round, Lula has 49% of the voting intentions for the October 30 run-off; five points above the president, who adds 44%, according to the Datafolha Institute, in its first survey published after Sunday’s elections.
Considering only the valid votes (no blanks or null votes), Lula would win the election with 53% and Bolsonaro would remain with 47%, according to the survey of 2,884 voters, with a margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points.
Other pollsters this week published estimates on the intention to vote in the second round, such as Ipec, which placed Lula with 51% against 43% for Bolsonaro last Wednesday.
Lula, 76, obtained 48.4% of the votes in the first round, compared to the 50% and 51% predicted respectively by Datafolha and Ipec, two pollsters with a recognized track record in Brazil, who thus got their predictions right within the margin of mistake for the former leftist president.
However, they did not anticipate the good result of Bolsonarismo: with 100% of the schools scrutinized, the 67-year-old president won 43.2% of the votes, compared to a maximum of 37% attributed by the polls in the previous months.
In the last Datafolha poll published before the elections, Bolsonaro appeared with 34%.
This Friday’s survey shows a reduction in the distance between the two candidates in a ballot compared to the last time Datafolha consulted on that scenario, on the eve of the elections.
At that time, Lula obtained 54% in a still possible second round compared to 38% for the far-right president.
This week, analysts considered several reasons that would explain the discrepancies between the results and their scenarios: from possible problems with the design of the surveys and precision errors in the sample due to the postponement of the 2020 demographic census, to the migration of votes from the last moment.
Nor do they rule out the effects of direct attacks on the polls launched by Bolsonaro, who stresses that the important thing is the temperature of the streets, which he nicknames “DataPueblo.”
Deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of the president, announced Monday that he will collect signatures to open a parliamentary commission to investigate opinion polling companies for their errors.
