Brazil's October 4 presidential race tightened again in the first week of August, and the more consequential shift wasn't in a poll number — it's that Flávio Bolsonaro finally locked down a running mate. Two pollsters measured the contest days apart last week, and both found President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's cushion over the senator shrinking just as the country's official campaign period gets underway.
Neck and Neck in One Poll, More Breathing Room in Another
Nexus, working under contract for BTG Pactual, measured a simulated runoff at 46% Lula to 45% Bolsonaro on August 3 — a one-point gap that sits inside the poll's own margin of error, down from a four-point Lula lead the week before. The firm reached 2,002 voters by phone.
Genial Investimentos' pollster, Quaest, put out its own numbers two days later: Lula 44%, Bolsonaro 39% in the runoff, compared with 45% to 37% in the firm's mid-July round. The first-round figures moved the same direction — Lula down a point to 39%, Bolsonaro up two to 30% — with Ronaldo Caiado and Renan Santos each at 4% and Romeu Zema at 2%. Quaest surveyed 2,004 people, margin of error 2 points.
Different pollsters, different-sized gaps — a routine effect of firms using different methods — but the direction agrees: whatever ground Lula picked up through July looks like it's eroding again.
A Wider Range of Estimates
Not every survey from the past two weeks tells the story with the same intensity. A rundown from political newsletter PoliticalWire put an AtlasIntel poll from late July at a six-point Lula lead, 49% to 43%, and cited a Datafolha survey from around the same window showing roughly a five-point gap. Line up all four and Lula's edge over Bolsonaro has landed anywhere between one point and nearly six this cycle, depending almost entirely on who's doing the asking.
Why Bolsonaro Has Lost Ground
Some of the tightening traces back to a rough stretch for Bolsonaro himself. A leaked recording caught him asking banker Daniel Vorcaro, who is fighting fraud allegations, for money to help finance a film about his father, and he spent weeks in — then out of — a public feud with stepmother and former first lady Michelle Bolsonaro, according to the Council of the Americas' running tracker of the race.
A tariff standoff with Washington has also spilled into the campaign. Voters appear to be assigning more of the blame to Bolsonaro than to Lula for a 25% U.S. levy on Brazilian goods that took hold in mid-July: in Quaest's polling, 46% of respondents said Lula does the better job standing up for Brazil's interests, against 38% who picked Bolsonaro, according to Americas Quarterly's profile of the field. Separately, election authorities have opened an inquiry into an AI-generated video of Bolsonaro that surfaced around a party gathering this month — an early test of the rules on synthetic media both campaigns agreed to earlier this year, Rio Times reported.
Both Tickets Are Now Set
The polling churn lands just as both campaigns finalize their rosters. Lula's Workers' Party confirmed his bid for a fourth term at an August 2 convention, keeping Vice President Geraldo Alckmin as his running mate. Bolsonaro settled his own pick three days later, naming Alagoas congressman Alfredo Gaspar as his No. 2 after several potential allies — Progressistas, Republicanos and Podemos among them — chose neutrality over backing him, leaving Bolsonaro to run on an all-Liberal Party slate, Reuters reported. A Brasília-based political analyst told the wire service the pick gives Bolsonaro a way to court voters in Brazil's northeast, a region his father's movement has traditionally struggled to win over.
Jair Bolsonaro is not on the ballot. The former president is serving a 27-year, three-month sentence and has been ruled ineligible for office until 2030 over his role in the effort to overturn Brazil's 2022 election, though he has publicly endorsed his son's run.
What Happens Between Now and the Vote
Candidates had to be formally registered with Brazil's electoral court by August 15. Paid political advertising begins the next day, August 16, and continues through October 3, per the Council of the Americas' election-calendar guide. Voting remains mandatory for Brazilians between 18 and 70, a rule that tends to make the country's election-day results — and its pre-election polling — track more closely than in places where voting is optional. A candidate who fails to clear 50% of the valid vote on October 4 faces the runner-up in a second round on October 25.
Two months out, with both tickets finalized and pollsters still disagreeing on the size of the gap, Brazil's race looks tight enough that little between now and October is likely to settle it early.
