Datafolha delivers this Friday (11) another snapshot of the presidential race. The survey is released just days after the crisis between the branches of government reached its most tense point, with developments that dominated the news and pushed the electoral debate to the center of the national agenda.
A survey taken in the midst of turmoil
Data collection began on Tuesday (8) and continued until this Friday, closely following the developments of the crisis in the Supremo Tribunal Federal. In total, 2.002 people were interviewed in the country's five regions, in an effort to capture how the electorate absorbed the most recent events.
The study's margin of error is two percentage points, plus or minus, within a confidence interval of 95%. This means that, in 95 out of every 100 similar samples, the results would tend to fall within this range.
Third snapshot of the campaign
This is the third presidential poll released since the official start of the electoral campaign — and the first by Datafolha in which all interviews were conducted already under the rules and pace of the formal contest. This detail matters: surveys conducted before the campaign kickoff capture an electoral mood that had not yet passed through the filter of advertising, party programs and direct clashes between candidates.
The institute has a tradition of releasing its numbers on Fridays, and this week's survey should be read with even more attention because of the atypical scenario.
The weight of the STF crisis
The crisis involving the Supremo has put the relationship between the branches of government in check and brought to voters a discussion that goes beyond government proposals: the country's own institutional stability. Historically, episodes of tension between the Executive, Legislative and Judiciary tend to affect the electorate's perception of risk — and, consequently, voting intention.
Therefore, the reading of Friday's numbers interests not only the candidates, but also political analysts, who will seek to identify whether the institutional friction caused vote migration, increased rejection of certain names or simply reinforced the undecided.
What to watch in the numbers
- First-round voting intention: the distribution among pre-candidates and the distance between them.
- Runoff scenarios: simulations of direct confrontation, which help measure vote transfer.
- Rejection: the percentage of voters who say they would not vote for each name under any circumstances.
- Government approval: how the mood regarding the current administration connects to the race.
- Voter priorities: which issues — economy, health, security or democracy — appear at the top of the list.
Next steps
With the electoral calendar underway and the institutional temperature still high, new polls should follow in the coming weeks, drawing an increasingly clear picture of what the Brazilian voter thinks. Friday's data, however, arrive with extra weight: they were collected exactly at the moment when the crisis was reaching its peak.