Why apparent underdogs keep winning for governor in Bahia

For months, polls for the governor’s race in Bahia, the largest state in Brazil’s Northeast region, suggested that ACM Neto would cruise to a first-round landslide. A win for the former mayor of state capital Salvador would mean the return of the Magalhães clan to the helm of a state it dominated for decades.

But one poll suggests Jerônimo Rodrigues, the state’s former education secretary running for the Workers’ Party, should be the one preparing his victory party. An electoral reading published on Thursday by Atlas Intel puts Mr. Rodrigues 8 points ahead of Mr. Neto with a 48-40 lead.

The poll is a major outlier, with traditional institutes Datafolha and Ipec placing Mr. Rodrigues 15 points behind.

But there are reasons not to discredit the Atlas poll. If Mr. Rodrigues does pull off this remarkable come-from-behind win, it would not be the first time an apparent underdog has won election in Brazil's oldest state. In fact, dark horses from the Workers’ Party won the governorship in first-round landslides in both 2006 and 2014, despite trailing in the polls for most of the campaign.

“Since 2006, we have seen Bahia and the whole Northeastern region lean to center-left candidates”, Luciana Santana, a political science professor at the Federal University of Alagoas, told The Brazilian Report. 

In his book The Brazilian Presidential Elections, political scientist Alberto Carlos Almeida argues that Bolsa Família, an aid scheme introduced in 2004 amalgamating and expanding different social programs, has been extremely successful for the Workers’ Party in courting votes from poor Brazilians...