Brazil Runoff: Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro Polling Nearly Even

Brazil holds the second round of its presidential election on October 25, pitting Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the eldest son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, against incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Pollster Datafolha's final pre-runoff survey, conducted October 20-22 among 2,154 respondents with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points, found Flávio at 47% and Lula at 46% of the total vote. Among valid votes only, excluding the 5% who said they would cast blank ballots and the 2% still undecided, the two were tied at 50% each, according to Reuters' reporting on the poll.

How the race has moved

The runoff was triggered because neither candidate won an outright majority in the October 4 first round, when Flávio Bolsonaro took 47.03% of votes to Lula's 45.16%, according to Americas Quarterly. Abstention in that first round reached 21.08%, the highest rate since 1998, the outlet reported.

Datafolha's own tracking shows the contest tightening steadily: the pollster had Flávio ahead by roughly 4 points on October 8 and by 51% to 49% on October 15 (among valid votes), before the two candidates reached parity in the October 22 wave, according to Rio Times Online, which aggregates Brazilian polling.

Not every pollster shows as tight a race. Rio Times Online reported that, across 41 polls from 20 different pollsters published since October 5, Flávio led in 35 and held an average lead of about 51% to 49% on valid votes as of October 24. Prediction markets diverged further still: Polymarket and Kalshi priced Flávio's chance of winning at roughly 78-79% as of October 24, according to the same tracking, a wider gap than any individual poll.

Two political families, one ballot

Flávio Bolsonaro is a sitting senator, and his Liberal Party emerged from the first round as Brazil's largest congressional bloc, with 28 Senate seats and 121 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, Americas Quarterly reported. His father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, is under house arrest; analysts cited by Americas Quarterly said that if Flávio wins, one of his government's first acts is expected to be seeking his father's release and a broader amnesty for people involved in the January 8, 2023, attacks on government buildings in Brasília.

Lula, 80, is seeking what would likely be his final term after winning a comeback election in 2022. Americas Quarterly reported that his campaign has faced headwinds from an economic slowdown, high interest rates and corruption scandals affecting Brazil's political establishment.

A fan-led push for Lula

With the race tight, a coalition called Fandoms com Lula has mobilized Brazilian fan communities of pop acts including BTS, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and Anitta to campaign for the president, Latin Times reported. Core groups named in the reporting include Update Swift Brasil, BTS Project Brasil, Anitta Golden and Beyoncé Brasil, organized into teams handling translation, content, data analysis and platform moderation.

The campaign's stated target is not undecided voters but the roughly 33 million eligible Brazilians who abstained in the first round and about 6 million who cast blank or null ballots, according to Latin Times. None of the artists themselves endorsed Lula; the report noted the fan accounts "operate independently of artist management and record labels."

How the vote will be counted

Brazil's roughly 125 million voters cast ballots on 499,248 electronic voting machines that are never connected to the internet, a system in use for more than 30 years, Fox News reported. Nearly nine in ten voters authenticate with a fingerprint, machine software is open to public inspection for 11 months before being sealed, and randomly selected machines are audited on camera, with tallies posted at each polling station alongside a QR code for public verification. Brazil's Superior Electoral Court says there has been no proven fraud since the system's 1996 debut, according to the same report.

Results from the first round were known within about four hours of polls closing, and officials expected a similarly fast count for the runoff, Fox News reported.