Are Brazil’s pollsters right about the presidential election?
All expect President Jair Bolsonaro to lose, but they differ about the size of his defeat
Just after 8am on September 27th, five days before the first round of a presidential election, a worker from Brazil’s most prominent polling firm, Datafolha, stops pedestrians at a five-way intersection in São Paulo to ask whom they plan to vote for. He selects his subjects—an old man in a baseball cap, a young woman with a nose piercing—according to age and sex quotas that reflect the electorate. He asks them to point to their candidate’s name on a chart (circular, to lessen bias), and records their answers on a tablet.
This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline “Are the polls right?”
From the October 1st 2022 edition
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