Brazilians in 12 states will vote for governor

Citizen registering to vote. Photo: Alejandro Zambrana/Secom/TSE

Besides the presidential runoff pitting Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva against Jair Bolsonaro, voters in 12 of Brazil’s states will also vote for governor today. In these states, no candidate obtained a majority of votes on October 2 and the two best-voted names qualified for the second round.

In many states, candidates are in a statistical tie according to the polls. But if the polls missed out on the strong support for Jair Bolsonaro in the presidential race, they made even bigger mistakes in some of the state races.

In São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest electoral constituency, the polls had Workers’ Party contender Fernando Haddad comfortably ahead of Tarcísio de Freitas, Mr. Bolsonaro’s former infrastructure minister — 39-31. But Mr. Haddad ended up with less than 36 percent of the vote, while Mr. Freitas obtained a whopping 42 percent.

In Bahia, most pollsters had former Salvador Mayor ACM Neto within inches of a first-round landslide. But it was Jerônimo Rodrigues, the Workers’ Party candidate unknown to voters just months before the October 2 first round, who very nearly clinched the race for governor. Voters gave Mr. Rodrigues 49 percent of the vote, against 41 percent for Mr. Neto. A week prior, our own Cedê Silva had already flagged that Mr. Rodrigues was likely to prove the polls wrong.

Beyond deciding who will occupy the governor’s seat, these races could help decide the presidential dispute, as several candidates have engaged in four weeks of non-stop campaigning — usually pegging their names to one of the two candidates.

Lula, who is set to get fewer votes in the Southeast region (home to 41 percent of Brazilians), hopes that he may extend his margins in the Northeast in order to reach a majority. In that sense, having allies fighting for office in five of the region’s nine states may be an important boost.

The Amazonian state of Rondônia, however, is an interesting case. Instead of having candidates representing each side of the national polarization between Lula and Mr. Bolsonaro, it has two Bolsonaro loyalists in a statistical tie. Editor Euan Marshall explained the race in one of Brazil’s major centers of deforestation.