That can be seen most clearly in Minas Gerais, the bellwether state
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskIn the first round of voting, Lula got 48.4% to Mr Bolsonaro’s 43.2%, a difference of around 6m votes. That gives Lula the edge, but polls are tightening now that the nine other candidates are out of the race.shows Lula and Mr Bolsonaro with 52% and 48%, respectively, a technical tie given the margin of error.
Montes Claros is one of 357 cities that have historically voted for Lula’s Workers’ Party , but voted for Mr Bolsonaro or another candidate in 2018. It was won back by theon October 2nd. So were 225 other cities, nearly half of them in Minas. Mr Bolsonaro’s campaign has made flipping them again a priority. In his headquarters Mr Freitas, the congressman, points at a map of the region in which each municipality is marked with a coloured pin. The red ones represent mayors allied with Lula.
This split-ticket phenomenon had also marked previous elections. Both Lula and Dilma Rousseff, his successor from the, won at the same time as governors from the centre-right Brazilian Party of Social Democracy . Before the run-off in 2014, which was decided by 3.5m votes, thegovernor-elect of Minas called each of the state’s 850 mayors to say that his “work would be much easier” if Ms Rousseff won, according to Thomas Traumann, a former adviser to her.
Voters in Francisco Sá may be more impressionable. Only 10% of working-age residents have formal jobs, half are poor, and the biggest employer is the city hall, which also oversees lists of the 5,000 families who receive. In public Mr Casasanta, the mayor, praises Mr Bolsonaro for increasing such benefits. But in an interview withhe also blames Lula for introducing them. “The money made the population lazy,” he says, adding that he struggles to find cheap labour for his cattle ranch.