SAO PAULO (Reuters) – Brazilian presidential candidate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s lead over President Jair Bolsonaro has widened slightly to 6 percentage points less than one week ahead of a runoff vote, two polls showed on Wednesday.
Both were conducted between Sunday and Tuesday, and the results could have been influenced by Sunday’s incident in which Bolsonaro ally Roberto Jefferson shot at police, resisting arrest.
Lula would win 53% of the valid votes, up from last week’s 52%, against 47% for Bolsonaro, who had 48% in the previous poll, a survey by PoderData said.
A poll by Genial/Quaest found Lula widening his lead slightly to 48% of voter support, while Bolsonaro remains at 42%. Excluding blank or annulled votes and the undecided, Lula had 53% of the votes to Bolsonaro’s 47%, the same numbers for valid votes as the PoderData poll showed.
Genial/Quaest tried to estimate the impact of abstentions by making a “likely voter” adjustment for probable intentions: It showed Lula with 52.1% of valid votes against 47.9% for Bolsonaro, a narrower result than the 52.8% to 47.2% the model showed last week.
Brazilians will vote in the second round of the presidential election on Sunday.
Pollsters were widely criticized after the first-round vote for significantly underestimating support for Bolsonaro.
PoderData interviewed 5,000 voters by telephone and the poll has a margin of error of 1.5 percentage points up or down.
Pollster Genial/Quaest interviewed 2,000 people in person and its survey has a margin of error of 2 percentage points.
(Reporting by Carolina Pulice, Peter Frontini and Anthony Boadle; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
