00:08:19 · James Bosworth, Tracy Alloway, Joe Weisenthal
[00:08:19] S2: Oh, absolutely. You know, better than a third, right? They had a chance of winning. And the reasons were, I mean, you could see him slowly catching up in the polls and you could see his campaign just doing well, generally. Now, I can't base a prediction on vibes. All of the data, all of the polls said Flavio Bolsonaro was going to win. And so, I mean, based on the first in the first round data, it looked like Flavio winning. But, you know, you have to sort of factor in, OK, but he's catching up and the polls seem to be hurting together and correlated. And there were other issues as well. So that all went. [00:08:48] S0: Into the model. How much of the miss by prediction markets and pollsters, I guess, had to do with, I guess, surprise voters actually turning out in the election? Because it seems like maybe a lot of people who weren't polled actually turned up and voted for Lula. [00:09:05] S2: So on one hand, it's really small numbers. The change in turnout from the first round to the second round was less than 2%. You had a slight shift in terms of non-voters, people who cast blank or invalidated ballots the first round. You had another 1% or 2%. But in Brazil, that's a couple million votes. And in an election won by 4 million votes, you know, a shift of 1% or 2% across those rounds really did make the difference. [00:09:27] S1: Wait, what's the deal with Bolsonaro's stepmom? [00:09:30] S2: Michelle? [00:09:31] S1: Yeah. What was the deal? I saw in your newsletter, you mentioned something she said or did that didn't help the race. What was that all about?
00:09:31 · Joe Weisenthal, James Bosworth, Tracy Alloway
[00:09:31] S1: Yeah. What was the deal? I saw in your newsletter, you mentioned something she said or did that didn't help the race. What was that all about? [00:09:36] S2: So early on, Michelle, who's a stepmom, Michelle Bolsonaro had, and she won a Senate seat, by the way, during this past election. Oh, good for her. But she and Flavio had a little fight and then they made up. And now she's considering changing parties potentially, which is also odd to leave the Bolsonaro party when her last name is Bolsonaro. But she and Flavio had this just spat in which it seemed like Flavio was not respecting her. And because Flavio... was already weak among women voters, this did not help the odds for his campaign. Across the whole campaign, he had setback after setback. It's actually impressive. He did as well as he did in the first round. But his campaign, he was also very professional. If you watched him in the debates, he was very well coached. He didn't answer the questions, but that's typical in a lot of debates across democracies. He was very well coached. He did not do poorly in the debates. [00:10:23] S0: Well, speaking of Bolsonaro's party, are you seeing like a fracturing there? Because I think he's rejecting the results of the election from the US where he now is. But meanwhile, his party has accepted the result, right? So like, His own party has accepted the result that he's rejecting. What does that mean?
00:10:23 · Tracy Alloway, James Bosworth
[00:10:23] S0: Well, speaking of Bolsonaro's party, are you seeing like a fracturing there? Because I think he's rejecting the results of the election from the US where he now is. But meanwhile, his party has accepted the result, right? So like, His own party has accepted the result that he's rejecting. What does that mean? [00:10:42] S2: The fracturing is not as bad as it was four years ago. I mean, four years ago, after Jair's attempted coup, there was a real fracture. And you saw a lot of centrist parties jump in and support Lula. It gave Lula big support for the first year of his presidency in this most recent term. This time, you do see it's not a fracturing, but it's a recognition, I think, that maybe the Bolsonaros shouldn't be the candidates in 2030, right? They're already playing this out and saying, we need to figure out a strategy because everybody knows that if the candidate had been Tarcísio de Freitas, who won the governor of Sao Paulo or any other right-wing candidate, they would have, that person would have defeated Lula. I feel convinced of it. Every Brazilian analyst feels convinced of it. So the question is, how do we avoid running the Bolsonaros in 2030 so that somebody else can run because that candidate will be a stronger candidate than anyone with the last name of Bolsonaro?
00:11:51 · Joe Weisenthal, James Bosworth
[00:11:51] S1: I have a question, and this is something I know nothing about. It's not even really related to the election specifically. In fact, it's one of those things you read an article about every once in a while and forget. After Brazil, they did badly in the World Cup this year, and I saw a bunch of people on social media complaining or tweeting, like, oh, Brazil hasn't been good at soccer ever since the Catholic population of the country has declined. these evangelicals can't play soccer. This is just tweets that I saw. Can you talk a little bit about the sort of like politics and the rise, like the historical rise? I mostly associate Latin American countries with Catholicism, but I know these are like dated takes and that across Latin America, there's been a pretty big rise in like American style, evangelical Christianity, et cetera. Can you talk a little bit about who that demographic is? is like that shift, that wave, et cetera. [00:12:44] S2: And it's hard because the evangelicals also correlate somewhat more with rural voters in certain areas. The urban voters, as occurs in the United States in some ways. Right. But the evangelical rise in Brazil has definitely created a divide inside of the electorate. And you saw it every poll. There's not really exit polls in the same way we have in the U.S., but every poll in Brazil showed that the evangelical community largely voted for Bolsonaro and the Catholic community largely voted for Lula. But as evangelicals and Catholics are getting closer, close to parity in Brazil.
00:12:44 · James Bosworth, Joe Weisenthal
[00:12:44] S2: And it's hard because the evangelicals also correlate somewhat more with rural voters in certain areas. The urban voters, as occurs in the United States in some ways. Right. But the evangelical rise in Brazil has definitely created a divide inside of the electorate. And you saw it every poll. There's not really exit polls in the same way we have in the U.S., but every poll in Brazil showed that the evangelical community largely voted for Bolsonaro and the Catholic community largely voted for Lula. But as evangelicals and Catholics are getting closer, close to parity in Brazil. [00:13:15] S1: What has driven that, though? What is the long-term structural driver of the growth of evangelical Christianity across Latin America? [00:13:24] S2: To self-define, they're evangelical. They are constantly recruiting. They're self-promoters, Joe. And the Catholic Church, I think, has fallen behind on certain aspects of that. I think the other aspect of this is, there's elements of the Catholic Church, in the United States and in Latin America that are quite conservative, small C conservative in terms of how they view social policy. And Lula's coalition is much more small L liberal in the sense of they will support gay marriage. And I think that divide has caused the Catholic Church to have some drop in Latin America and in Brazil while the evangelical community has taken advantage of that.
00:13:24 · James Bosworth, Tracy Alloway, Joe Weisenthal
[00:13:24] S2: To self-define, they're evangelical. They are constantly recruiting. They're self-promoters, Joe. And the Catholic Church, I think, has fallen behind on certain aspects of that. I think the other aspect of this is, there's elements of the Catholic Church, in the United States and in Latin America that are quite conservative, small C conservative in terms of how they view social policy. And Lula's coalition is much more small L liberal in the sense of they will support gay marriage. And I think that divide has caused the Catholic Church to have some drop in Latin America and in Brazil while the evangelical community has taken advantage of that. [00:14:04] S0: The last time we had you on this podcast, you talked about an orange wave or the idea of a bunch of Latin American leaders sort of aligning themselves with Trump and striking deals and all of that. With the surprise result in Brazil, does that mean that the orange wave has crested, I guess, or is Brazil an exception? [00:14:25] S2: It's a great question. Everyone's watching Argentina next year to find out what the answer to that is. So there's sort of two questions here, right? One is this idea that there are a bunch of pro-Trump leaders who have won. And whether that was because there's been a shift to the right or just a pendulum in an anti-incumbent environment, I tend to be the latter explanation. Trump was going around saying he was nine for nine in elections recently. He just pulled that number out. [00:14:48] S1: Of the air.