On February 25, 2019, Brazil found itself with two presidents. José de Abreu, 72, an actor and minor celebrity who has long been active in left-wing politics, proclaimed himself the president of the country on Twitter. He then followed this tweet with a series of others, moving the capital of Brazil, naming his Cabinet, forming a “party,” and freeing ex-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, currently in jail on charges of money laundering and corruption.

To be clear, two presidents is one more than Brazil normally has, yet a constitutional crisis does not appear to be forthcoming. Abreu’s proclamation is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the political crisis in Venezuela, criticizing the opposition leader Juan Guaidó’s decision to proclaim himself interim president of Venezuela on January 23. If Guaidó could declare himself president, Abreu argued, then he could do the same in Brazil.

Yet this novelty seems to say more about the fractures within the left in Brazil — and indeed Latin America — than it presages a robust opposition to newly elected President Jair Bolsonaro. The left in Latin America, after a resurgent “pink tide” in the 2000s spearheaded by Lula, has suffered badly over the past few years. The right has racked up victories in countries previously led by the center left over the past few years, such as Argentina in 2015, Chile in 2017, and Colombia and Brazil in 2018. The left, up to now, has offered little in the way of a counterattack.

Abreu’s statement might be an elaborate satire, but it does expose some divisions in the opposition to Bolsonaro. In addition to indignation from the right, Abreu has attracted flak from the left, especially after indicating that Rio city council member Marielle Franco, who was killed by gunfire in March 2018, would be his first lady in memoriam. With characteristic tact, Abreu dismissed these criticisms by saying they were from a left with “bodies of the right,” disliking laughter and sex.

Abreu exemplifies two deep-seated problems on the Brazilian left. First, the only recognizable standard-bearer at the moment is doing it for laughs. Second, mocking the Venezuelan opposition comes off as tone-deaf in the context of Venezuela’s struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, as well as the profound humanitarian crisis that is affecting, among other countries, Brazil itself. In the end, the message Abreu propagated, albeit somewhat unintentionally, is that Brazil’s left is quite literally a joke.

For one, Abreu is gaining more media coverage than just about any other figure on the left. Real-life politicians have actually attached themselves to Abreu; one agreed to be his vice president. It is difficult to know much they are truly in on the joke. This is likely because, despite the tempestuous beginning to Bolsonaro’s term, complete with corruption scandals, complications from a surgery, and ill-considered pornographic tweets, no leader has begun to emerge from the wreckage of the 2018 election.

The left, it seems, is in disarray. The Workers’ Party (PT) won the most seats in Congress, but it is still reeling from Lula’s imprisonment. Indeed, it lost seats in Congress, and opposition to its time in power also helped propel Bolsonaro to victory. Ciro Gomes of the Democratic Labor Party (PDT) finished third in the 2018 election but flew off to Europe after the first round, upset with a perceived betrayal by Lula and the PT; since then, he has largely disappeared from the political scene. The Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), a smaller, more ideologically oriented party, did make gains in the 2018 elections but is still numerically small.

Nowhere is this lack of a standard-bearer more evident than with the crisis in Venezuela. As Bolsonaro and his government consider how to respond to the growing crisis in Venezuela, the left has sent out a divided message. Abreu’s satirical argument is typical of many within the PT, which has painted itself into a corner on Venezuela. Lula was an ally of Hugo Chávez when he was in office, and despite his imprisonment, his influence continues to be strong within the party. The president of the PT, Gleisi Hoffmann, a Lula surrogate, went to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s inauguration, and the party has sent out signals that it will continue to support him for now. Despite a turn to authoritarianism and an economic and humanitarian disaster, the PT is more fixated on opposing a possible intervention from the United States than opposing Maduro.

Supporting Maduro, however, will neither win over center-left or center parties nor be a popular option. According to the most recent wave of the Las Américas y el Mundo survey on public opinion and foreign policy in Brazil in 2014-’15, based out of the University of São Paulo and the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas in Mexico City, the US had an average thermometer score of 60 out of 100 among Brazilians as opposed to 37 for Venezuela. Given that Bolsonaro ran his campaign touting close ties to the US, and given how Venezuela has deteriorated since then, this difference is likely larger as of now. For a party looking to build an anti-Bolsonaro coalition, refusing to disavow Maduro’s regime is not a good look.

Abreu’s satire shines a light on a divide between the sensibilities of the older, more traditional left in Brazil and other elements of a possible opposition to Bolsonaro. Abreu himself is unlikely to worsen these divides, but he shows the problems that could develop for the opposition if Bolsonaro, the US, or other regional actors opt to press the issue in Venezuela, with one element supporting the Maduro administration and another rather more ambivalent. An escalation of the issue could drive a wedge between different tendencies of a fractious opposition in Brazil.

Meanwhile, Abreu seems determined to keep the joke going. A prolific tweeter, he has continued to spread serious messages about left-wing politics on his account as well as satirical messages about Bolsonaro, Guaidó, and a variety of other targets. Bolsonaro tweeted in response that he plans to sue Abreu, while some of his supporters started a hashtag calling for Abreu to be imprisoned. None of this, however, stopped Abreu from announcing his own inauguration, taking office as “president” with a speech in front of well-wishers at the airport in Rio de Janeiro.

It wasn’t supposed to be a walkover, but it just about was one. Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right candidate of the PSL (Social Liberal Party), fell just short of an outright majority in the first round of Brazil’s elections on October 7, winning 46 percent of all valid votes (that is, excluding spoiled and blank ballots). Fernando Haddad of the PT (Workers’ Party) also made October 28’s runoff, finishing a distant second with 29 percent. According to poll aggregator PollingData.com.br, Bolsonaro is a clear favorite, with a 98 percent chance of winning the second round and an advantage of between 6 and 14 percent in the polls.

Polls significantly undershot both Bolsonaro and Haddad’s numbers, with the biggest polling firms putting Bolsonaro around 40 to 41 percent and Haddad around 24 to 25 percent. I had warned before the election that one should take polling figures in Brazil with a grain of salt. So what went wrong? And could these problems happen in other places, too?

Sampling difficulties for Brazilian polls

Polls in Brazil suffer from problems that also afflict other countries, but these problems can be accentuated because of limitations with Brazilian polls. The Brazilian Polling Error Database (BPED) — compiled with Mathieu Turgeon of the University of Western Ontario for a working paper currently under review — shows that the average absolute error for polls conducted just one day before the 2014 presidential election was 4.86 percent (most other countries average between 2 to 2.5 percent).  

One reason is that it can be difficult to access certain areas, which make face-to-face surveys more difficult. However, according to Neale El-Dash, the statistician behind PollingData, they are still often better than telephone-based surveys, which have generally been conducted with lists of phone numbers bought from companies without regard to their origins or possible biases.

To compensate, El-Dash says that “almost all surveys before this year were with quotas,” with some even conducted in public places with passersby. These quotas tend to be primarily for sex and age. This could have underestimated the effect of evangelical voters, who are, ceteris paribus, more likely to be poor and live in difficult-to-access areas. Evangelicals also voted en masse for Bolsonaro.

Social desirability bias

When Donald Trump was elected US president in 2016, outperforming poll predictions, some political scientists and commentators proposed that many Trump supporters could have been reluctant to share their preference for him to pollsters. The evidence has been mixed, but the unwillingness to publicly say socially undesirable things has been shown to affect survey responses on a variety of topics, including sex, drug use, and vote buying. Some voters might refuse to acknowledge support of controversial politicians to pollsters while still voting for them.

This looks to have applied to Bolsonaro, whose fondness for saying repugnant things is no secret. A reliance on face-to-face interviews could have produced an especially pronounced social desirability bias with Bolsonaro, a particularly controversial candidate; telling an interviewer to their face that one supports Bolsonaro could be more difficult than doing so on the phone.

Strategic voting

The US was also not the only country with two unpopular leading candidates. Both Bolsonaro and Haddad had sky-high rejection rates going into the election, both of them eclipsing 40 percent. Much like Trump captured an anti-Hillary vote and vice versa, both Haddad and Bolsonaro attracted votes by using the imminent threat of their opposite number.  

As polls began to indicate that Bolsonaro and Haddad were the two leading candidates, this could have led to last-minute shifts among those who opposed one of them. A certain subset of voters looks to not “waste” their vote on a candidate with no chance of winning — and this is especially salient when voters want to “stop” certain unpopular candidates. This can lead to two candidates pulling away from others, even in multi-round elections, as happened here.

Strategic shifts in elite support

In the US, we often talk about a coattails effect: The support for one high-profile candidate (typically president) can affect the support of candidates running for other positions. In Brazil, this effect exists, too, but it also exists in reverse: Local politicians use their networks to support majoritarian candidates.

Picking a candidate who ends up losing gains nothing for elites; picking one who wins can give them a job and influence. Something that passed under the radar this year, but was possibly very influential, was the fact that the National Congress of Brazil’s rural caucus abandoned the PSDB’s Geraldo Alckmin for Bolsonaro five days before the election. Alckmin duly underperformed expectations by 3 to 4 percent while Bolsonaro outperformed them.

This kind of shift might not have as big an effect as it did in the 1980s, but it is not irrelevant. While campaigning is illegal 24 hours before the election, it still exists — and sometimes with offers of cash as well. This sort of practice rarely influences voters who have already made up their minds, but it still could affect elections when people don’t have preferences for that race.

This time around, 10 to 16 percent either did not respond or did not choose a candidate in the last polls before the first round. Pre-election polling would not have been able to capture this type of movement or catch if it would systematically help (or harm) one candidate in particular.

Conclusion

In short, many of the same problems that have plagued polling in other countries are also present in Brazil. Yet they are likely accentuated by certain factors that are more specific to Brazil. Pollsters elsewhere — particularly in other developing countries — will have to be attuned to these potential pitfalls, or else they could repeat the same mistakes.

A viral (and false) meme shows a picture of Brazil’s left-leaning Workers’ Party presidential candidate Fernando Haddad, with a superimposed quote attributed to him: “When they turn five, children will become the property of the state. It’s up to us to decide if a boy will become a girl, and vice versa! It’s parents’ job to respectfully comply with our decision! We know what’s best for children!”

Meanwhile, a video viewed more than 4 million times since late September claims that the Workers’ Party was distributing baby bottles shaped like penises in daycare centers. 

These are among the false messages that have circulated through Brazil’s Pentecostal and evangelical social networks in the last few weeks of Brazil’s 2018 first-round presidential election campaign. Purveyors of “fake news” seek to manipulate evangelicals and Pentecostals by emphasizing the core issues of Brazil’s culture wars: gender, sexuality, and the role of parents and the state in children’s education.

Meanwhile, viral videos feature evangelicals praising the far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro — a politician whose incendiary comments and ambiguous commitment to democracy have led to frantic condemnations from such hotbeds of leftist radicalism as The Economist and Foreign Policy.

On Sunday October 7, Brazilians went to the polls for the first-round presidential election. Bolsonaro had steadily climbed in vote intentions for months. Still, to many observers’ shock, the rightist surpassed all projections, ending up with 46 percent of the first-round vote in a field of 13 candidates.

On October 28, Bolsonaro will face Haddad, who took second place, in a runoff election. The Workers’ Party candidate — the designated successor of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whom the Supreme Court had barred from candidacy due to a conviction for corruption — garnered just 29 percent of the vote.

What was the role of evangelicals and Pentecostals in the election? Did their support help drive the spike in Bolsonaro’s support? We think it did. As one of us shows in a forthcoming book, evangelicals and Pentecostals first started to get involved in Brazilian electoral politics in the 1980s. Still, Pentecostal and evangelical leaders have shown their political muscle in 2018 like never before.

Throughout most of its history, Brazil was known as a Catholic country. Beginning in the 1970s, however, the ranks of Pentecostal and evangelical clergy, as well as the pews of their congregations, began to swell. Rising from a bit over 5 percent of the population in 1970, evangelicals and Pentecostals will likely constitute nearly 30 percent of the population in Brazil’s 2020 census.

From the early days of Brazil’s return to democracy in the 1980s, evangelical and Pentecostal leaders have recognized the importance of electoral politics. Both the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and the Assembly of God have mobilized to support socially conservative policies and candidates.

Until now, though, evangelical and Pentecostal activists have usually been most effective in supporting candidates for legislative office. Under Brazil’s open list proportional representation rules in which a single district elects dozens of legislators, highly organized religious denominations such as the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God can muster enough votes to get their own legislative candidates elected.

But at the presidential level, evangelical and Pentecostal activism has usually been marked by disunity, with different denominations supporting different candidates. In the most recent presidential election of 2014, evangelical and Pentecostal alliances were “pulverized” among the three leading candidates.

Yet 2018 has taken a drastically different turn. Though various presidential candidates sought evangelical alliances in other recent elections, in 2018 Bolsonaro was the primary candidate to court evangelical leaders. Bolsonaro claims to be a nominal Catholic, yet he attends a Baptist church and has long sought the political support of evangelical and Pentecostal leaders. Cementing these alliances, he was baptized in the Jordan River by the prominent Assembly of God Pastor Everaldo Dias in 2016 (who himself had run for president in 2014).

So it was not surprising when influential Assemblies of God Pastor Silas Malafaia declared his support for Bolsonaro in March 2018. Malafaia predicted that 80 percent of the evangelical vote would go over to Bolsonaro with him. A frequent social media commentator, Malafaia began to use his online presence to attack Bolsonaro’s opponents.

Bolsonaro’s religious alliances solidified in the final week of the first-round campaign. On September 30, Edir Macedo, the powerful founder of the Universal Church for the Kingdom of God and owner of the third-biggest TV station in Brazil, publicly threw his support behind Bolsonaro and gave him a softball interview. José Wellington Bezerra da Costa, the president of the General Convention of the Assemblies of God of Brazil, soon followed in publicly endorsing Bolsonaro on October 2, as did the Congressional Evangelical Caucus on October 4.

Has all of this made any impact on evangelical and Pentecostal citizens? Malafaia might have been wrong about the exact figure, but there is no doubt that Bolsonaro has done well with evangelicals. In the final month of the election, Bolsonaro’s votes among evangelicals shot upward: from 26 percent on August 22 to 36 percent on September 20, and, finally, to 48 percent on October 4.

Still, the rapid growth in Bolsonaro’s support might not be due to the influence of evangelical leaders. The candidate’s support among non-evangelicals also rose dramatically in this period.

But survey evidence indicates that evangelical and Pentecostal citizens were at least getting the message from their leaders. Over the last two weeks of the first-round campaign, one of us (Amy Erica Smith) ran an online survey asking Brazilians about political information in their churches. Among those who attend church, 29 percent of Catholic church attendees, 38 percent of non-Pentecostal evangelicals, and 46 percent of Pentecostals were aware of their church leaders supporting a candidate. Nearly all of them said that that candidate was Bolsonaro.

So what happened? Did evangelical leaders’ campaigning matter? We suspect that it did. In the final days of the campaign, Bolsonaro’s support jumped by about 5 percentage points. Some of the voters Bolsonaro gained may have been persuaded by evangelical leaders and their church communities.

Yet perhaps the most important impact of Bolsonaro’s late-in-the-game evangelical endorsements may have been to give him the aura of momentum and inevitability. While much attention  has been paid to the #elenão movement against  Bolsonaro, the rejection rate for Haddad and the PT is nearly as high, reaching 40% in various polls. As a result, in the final days of the campaign, Bolsonaro picked up steam, as undecided voters jumped on his bandwagon, and strong opponents of the Workers’ Party decided he was their best bet.