00:01:18 · Tracy Alloway, Joe Weisenthal
[00:01:18] S0: It's a bit of an anti-climax, isn't it? You wait for election day and then like nothing really happens. [00:01:24] S1: Something might happen. But yeah, nothing happens during the day. So the day of election day is actually a really good time to talk about a bunch of other stuff. Talk about other elections. Yeah, to talk about other things that are going on because nothing really happens that day. But we did recently have other elections, as you hinted at, in Brazil. [00:01:41] S0: That's right. So we had a very, very surprise victory by Lula over Flavio Bolsonaro. And then Flavio Bolsonaro escaped Brazil. He fled, yeah. So that's a really interesting question, like what that means for Brazil-U.S. relations. The other thing that's been happening is Venezuela, right? [00:02:02] S1: Yeah. [00:02:03] S0: So right before we came on this podcast, there was a headline out of the New York Times saying that the U.S. was in discussions to set up a military presence in Venezuela. [00:02:13] S1: Oh, interesting. [00:02:15] S0: So, you know, that raises questions as well over whether or not like Venezuela is basically becoming a protectorate of the U.S., I guess. Right. [00:02:24] S1: So one of the things that we know is that the Trump administration, or at least the State Department, has this sort of weird, maybe surprisingly friendly relations with Delcy Rodríguez, the successor to Maduro, who we captured and now have in custody in New York earlier this year. And so, but like recently, like there's been the return of the Democratic challenger there.
00:02:24 · Joe Weisenthal, Tracy Alloway, James Bosworth
[00:02:24] S1: So one of the things that we know is that the Trump administration, or at least the State Department, has this sort of weird, maybe surprisingly friendly relations with Delcy Rodríguez, the successor to Maduro, who we captured and now have in custody in New York earlier this year. And so, but like recently, like there's been the return of the Democratic challenger there. [00:02:51] S0: The opposition leader. [00:02:52] S1: The opposition leader, et cetera. So it's sort of an interesting time to like catch up. Did we use this time? [00:02:58] S0: Let's talk about other American elections. Let's talk about other- South American elections. [00:03:03] S1: Politics elsewhere in the hemisphere. Anyway, very excited to have back on the podcast. We talked to him earlier this year. James Bosworth, he's non-resident fellow at the Stimson Center and he is the author of the excellent newsletter- the Latin America Risk Report. James, thanks so much for coming back on Odd Lots. [00:03:20] S2: Thank you for having me. [00:03:21] S1: Just tell us, how did Lula win after even going into that day, all the math and polls and everything thought it was pretty clearly going to be Flavio Bolsonaro?
00:03:21 · Joe Weisenthal, James Bosworth, Tracy Alloway
[00:03:21] S1: Just tell us, how did Lula win after even going into that day, all the math and polls and everything thought it was pretty clearly going to be Flavio Bolsonaro? [00:03:31] S2: So there are two answers to that. One is that Flavio was a terrible candidate, and the other was that Lula was a great candidate. So let me run through those both, right? Flavio was a terrible candidate. In fact, when I was here in New York the last time, I gave a presentation elsewhere and someone asked, what could Flavio Bolsonaro do better? And I said, change his last name. There's an element in which being a Bolsonaro was a weight on him. And I mean, you go back and his father, Jair Bolsonaro, former president, was accused of, convicted of being involved in a coup attempt in 2022, 2023. And if you remember January 8th, 2023, very similar to January 6th, 2021, there was a big event in Brasilia where a mob of protesters took over various buildings in the capital. And so Jair Bolsonaro was convicted of that. But Flavio has had issues. Five years ago, he was accused of money laundering while he was a congressman. Earlier this year, he was connected to Daniel Vorcaro, who was the head of Banco Master, which was a big financial scandal in Brazil, and was caught on WhatsApp asking for millions of dollars from this banker. [00:04:36] S0: Seems bad.
00:04:36 · Tracy Alloway, James Bosworth, Joe Weisenthal
[00:04:36] S0: Seems bad. [00:04:37] S2: It was bad. Right before the election, there was a Brazilian magazine that tied him to pharmaceutical lobbyists and prostitutes on a boat. And then even when he fled from Brazil, the plane he flew from Argentina to the US on was connected to a money laundering investigation inside of Argentina and a drug trafficking case in Texas. [00:04:57] S1: I want to get into all these details, but just All of this was true prior to the first round of the voting, right? So all of these negatives on him were in the case when he came in first during the first round of voting. So where did something go change or what was the mechanism via which that didn't translate to the final round? [00:05:20] S2: Across the last six years, eight years in Latin America, really across much of the world, we've been in an anti-incumbent environment. Everything is a referendum on the incumbent. And Lula da Silva was sitting at 45% in the polls. And the first round was really a referendum on Lula. It wasn't about Flavio Bolsonaro. In some ways, coming in first place in the first round was the worst thing that could happen to Flavio Bolsonaro because all of a sudden, all of the attention got put on him and it let Lula catch up from behind. It shook up his campaign and gave him the opportunity to win. [00:05:49] S0: Didn't he shake up his campaign strategy as well? I heard he hired a social media manager, put Put younger people in charge of some of it. The WhatsApp group.
00:05:49 · Tracy Alloway, James Bosworth
[00:05:49] S0: Didn't he shake up his campaign strategy as well? I heard he hired a social media manager, put Put younger people in charge of some of it. The WhatsApp group. [00:05:59] S2: He got his first cell phone. Lula had never had a smartphone before. Yes, they started Lula's Army, a WhatsApp group that had, I think, over 10 million people on it. Over 5% of Brazilian voters were on this WhatsApp group. And the day of the election, when there were various shenanigans on both sides, everybody plays dirty tricks, but certain mayors blocked the bus service. The WhatsApp group got into mode and started driving voters to the polls. Things like that really mattered. And Lula, who had never really understood social media, even though Brazil is the most online country potentially in the entire world, Lula had really, he nailed it during the debates. He hit these little 30-second clips that were perfect to share on social media. I don't know if he did it intentionally or not, but it was perfect.
00:05:59 · James Bosworth, Joe Weisenthal
[00:05:59] S2: He got his first cell phone. Lula had never had a smartphone before. Yes, they started Lula's Army, a WhatsApp group that had, I think, over 10 million people on it. Over 5% of Brazilian voters were on this WhatsApp group. And the day of the election, when there were various shenanigans on both sides, everybody plays dirty tricks, but certain mayors blocked the bus service. The WhatsApp group got into mode and started driving voters to the polls. Things like that really mattered. And Lula, who had never really understood social media, even though Brazil is the most online country potentially in the entire world, Lula had really, he nailed it during the debates. He hit these little 30-second clips that were perfect to share on social media. I don't know if he did it intentionally or not, but it was perfect. [00:06:41] S1: Some people just have that. You know, it's interesting what you say about this sort of like anti-incumbent bias working against Bolsonaro due to him having won the first round. I saw some people speculate, you know, in Universe B, where the U.S. is a different electoral system, whether Trump would have won in 2016 or had the first round been like, okay, let's narrow it down to the final two, kick off all the random third parties. Like, oh, like it's going to be Trump. Like, maybe not. You know, it's like, you never really know. But I could, I sort of get that, what you're saying. Like, it's sort of like resetting the expectations of who the president is. Right.