Jair Bolsonaro Fast Facts
A year ago, Jair Bolsonaro was the most unpopular and most divisive politician in Brazil. But since then, he’s been transformed into a political powerhouse, with the presidential popularity rating rising by about 6%, and his approval ratings among voters at 71%.
It’s possible that after his first year in office, he now has the greatest chance of becoming the next Bolsonaro presidential candidate. It might not be as easy as he thinks, though. We just got the full year-end ratings from a number of surveys and have put the results in the table below—with and without political context, and with and without a control.
We’ll start with an analysis of 2018’s ratings in 2015. To make the data a bit less noisy, we have only included ratings for candidates who are currently included in at least 10 surveys. As you can see, Bolsonaro’s numbers have been strong ever since his run in the 2016 race, and his rise over the past year has been even more pronounced.
In 2016, Bolsonaro only had five ratings from the previous survey, and was down across the board in our 2016 ratings in 2015—from -1% in the Gallup Poll to -3% in IBGE, -4% in UFPA, and -6% in HILDA. However, 2016 was his first campaign as a candidate for office. He took on the role of being the face of the political opposition, and his poll numbers shot up. His ratings are the best out of all of those candidates, which isn’t necessarily surprising, given the opposition nature of his campaign.
While Bolsonaro’s rating isn’t as good as he thinks it is, he’s still very close to the point where he could make it to the runoff in October. He just needs to keep this momentum and make sure he can maintain his ratings, or he could get knocked out in the runoff.
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