Antonio Lavareda: Abstention devoured 13 million of Lula's votes.

By Pedro Alexandre Sanches, from Opera Mundi - In an interview with Breno Altman on the program 20 MINUTES This Wednesday (October 19th), the president of the Institute for Social, Political and Economic Research (Ipespe), Antonio Lavareda, attributed the discrepancies between the electoral polls and the results at the ballot box to the level of voter abstention on the day of the first round, which would have devoured around 13 million votes for candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. He also stated that the presidential election will be decided on television, as used to happen in past contests, and that Lula's television campaign is at a disadvantage compared to Jair Bolsonaro's in terms of aesthetics and strategy. 

He criticizes, for example, the delay by the Workers' Party campaign in exploring the debate in Bandeirantes TV As a strategy to broadcast Lula's best moments to the television audience that didn't watch the direct confrontation last Sunday. "The debate so far has been more useful for Bolsonaro. Since yesterday, he has selected the segments with his best performance and brought them to broadcast television. Lula's campaign didn't do the same, don't ask me why," he says.

Lavareda draws attention to the still unparalleled impact of television advertising, comparing the record 1 million viewers of Lula's interview to the podcast. No FlowOn Tuesday night, the reach of Sunday's debate was estimated at 70 million Brazilians. Further evidence would come from this year's midterm election campaign in the United States, which is allocating three times more resources to television than to digital campaigns.

“It’s not noticeable that the boost Lula received on social media was accompanied by increased investment in television,” he states, referring to the aggressive performance of his ally from Minas Gerais, André Janones, in the social media environment. “Janones seems to be fulfilling a role equivalent to Bolsonaro’s negative campaign, concerned with rebutting and attacking Lula’s accusations in the same vein,” he interprets. The topic remains controversial: “Some argue that negativity in campaigns increases the rate of alienation in society, while others point out that people often remember and are more interested in negative information than positive information. Campaigns navigate between these two poles.”

The political scientist, who has worked on nearly a hundred major election campaigns, believes that Bolsonaro's television advertising is more polished and clearer than Lula's, even though the PT's programs acquired a greater emotional charge in the second round, especially due to the scenes of the huge street demonstrations taken from the campaign. 

“Bolsonaro is presented with the aesthetic of a president who will remain in office, while Lula's aesthetic presents him in shirtsleeves. A blazer would help to create the image of the former president,” he compares. Among other technical details, he criticizes the settings of the Workers' Party candidate's advertisements: “Lula is presented in a room of a house, which doesn't connote presidential suitability, the basis of the positive evaluation Lula has due to the eight years he was at the head of the country.”

Regarding the first debate of the second round, Lavareda sees Lula's weaknesses as his control of speaking time and his handling of the corruption issue. "The failure to manage his time left him exposed to spending some minutes as if in a firing squad, being shot down by Bolsonaro. He was lucky not to have taken any fatal shots, because Bolsonaro got tangled up and didn't know how to adapt his speech to his opponent's vulnerable moment," he opines. According to him, Lula neither promptly responded to Bolsonaro's attacks on corruption nor received a reasonable response from him.

Regarding the reliability of election polls, the researcher contradicts the common belief that projections for the first round correctly predicted Lula's vote and underestimated Bolsonaro's. He argues that an optical illusion arose in translating voting intentions into actual votes cast: "It's an optical illusion. The polls were spot on, in quotes, regarding Bolsonaro's vote. And they were wrong, in quotes, regarding Lula's, because about 13 million of Lula's votes were lost to abstention." 

Lavareda points out that the current president received 33% of the votes from a total of 156,5 million voters, exactly what appeared in voting intentions according to institutes such as Ipespe, Ipec, Quaest, and Datafolha. As for Lula, projections indicated that he would receive 46% of the total votes, but at the ballot box, the candidate was only legitimized by 37% of voters. The explanation for the discrepancy lies in the levels of abstention, unfavorable to Lula: “Brazil is a country that adopts mandatory voting, but does not offer conditions for a large part of the citizens to attend the polls. Tens of millions of citizens are led to compulsory abstention because they do not have the money to pay for public transportation.” 

Largely inclined towards Lula, the lower-income and less educated segments of the population were the most absent from the voting booths: “Among people with higher education, abstention is around 12% on average, and among people at the base it reaches 52%. It's a stupid difference.” According to the political scientist, Lula's loss of votes due to abstention is evidence, while hypotheses about strategic votes being withdrawn from third-party candidates and prematurely cast for Bolsonaro are nothing more than conjecture.

The authorization given by the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) for municipalities to offer free transportation to voters on election day will not correct the structural problem, according to Lavareda. “It helps, but it doesn't solve the problem, because it gives autonomy to the municipalities. In states where the vote is more aligned with Bolsonaro's, the mayors don't want to adopt this measure. In my understanding, free transportation should be mandatory, not just permitted.”

The political scientist assures that the final results will not be as surprising as those of the first round: "The good news is that the pre-election numbers will be very close to those at the polls." But he makes a reservation: "Obviously, it is necessary to remember the margin of error. In the Ipespe poll, the numbers are already at the extreme of the margin of error, like a technical tie." Antonio Lavareda foresees a closer result than in 2014, when Dilma Rousseff defeated Aécio Neves by a margin of 3,4% of the votes.

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