Tonight the first polls are published in Brazil for the crucial and stormy election on Sunday the 30th between the leftist former president Lula da Silva and the far-right and current head of state Jair Bolsonaro. The projections of the most prestigious demographic houses in the country, which enjoyed good international fame, Datafolha and IPEC, which is the old Ibope, will be known. However, the dissemination of the polls is comical, or dramatic for companies, when people all over the planet throw their hands in their heads over last Sunday's mistakes.
The essential and colossal mistake is that in recent weeks and especially in the final days of the campaign, as on the day before, the main diagnosis was that Lula was already winning, by exceeding 50% of the votes, without the need to hold a second round.
However, the result attributed to Lula was correct. He was predicted 50%-51%, in some polls with a margin of error of two points, up or down. He got 48.4%.
The big problem lies at the other extreme of the Brazilian political board, without it being entirely certain headlines that are seen these days in many countries that only Bolsonaro was right. The president claimed 60% daily and argued that the opposite would mean that something "strange" had happened in the count. With 43.2% of it, it must have been extremely rare.
With his demagogic skill, he changed the speech and proclaimed that he had won and the polls had lost, since he scored seven points more than expected and the difference to Lula was five points, compared to the 15 announced. Four years ago, in the first round he scored up to 10 points more than announced. It is seen in both processes that over a quarter of the Bolsonarist electorate is not detected.
His attacks on the polls have multiplied. She speaks of “Datapovo”, to link her to the “filho do povo” (son of the people), as Lula is known. He says that Datafolha cannot do any more surveys. These are mild diatribes, for whom he has made an apology for rape, coup, dictatorship, violence with homosexual children and non-compliance with the rules of the pandemic.
And therein lies one of the problems. It is what the Estado de São Paulo newspaper calls “the embarrassed vote”. Since the collapse of the PSDB of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, president in the 1990s, and whose successors all failed, the wealthy classes have been orphaned of a presentable candidate. They detest Lula because of her redistributive policy and consider him a thief. They only have Bolsonaro left, even if he disgusts them, which makes it difficult for them to tell the truth to the pollster.
The errors also affect Bolsonaro's candidates for governors in several states. In the decisive São Paulo the balance of the surveys was dire at both levels. It indicates a deeper problem, more technical, that of overvaluing Lula's electorate, more humble and racially discriminated, according to newspapers such as the British The Guardian or the Argentine La Nación. Brazil has not carried out a population census since 2010. And that is the essential tool to create a sample that reflects society as a whole.
