Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s lead over President Jair Bolsonaro has widened slightly to 6 percentage points, with less than a week to go until the second round in Brazil, two polls showed on Wednesday.
Both were conducted between Sunday and Tuesday, and the results may have been influenced by the incident on Sunday in which Roberto Jefferson, a Bolsonaro ally, shot at police while resisting arrest.
Lula would obtain 53% of the valid votes, up from 52% last week, compared to 47% for Bolsonaro, who had 48% in the previous poll, according to a PoderData survey.
In another Bright Side/Quaest poll, the former leftist president had 48% support from voters, up from 47% last week, while Bolsonaro stood at 42%.
Bright Side/Quaest tried to estimate the impact of abstentions by adjusting for “likely voter,” which showed Lula with 52.1% of valid votes to Bolsonaro’s 47.9%, a narrower result than 52.8% to 47.2% that the model showed last week.
The second round of the presidential elections in Brazil is scheduled for Sunday, October 30.
Pollsters were widely criticized after the first-round vote for significantly underestimating support for Bolsonaro.
PoderData interviewed 5,000 voters by phone and its poll has a margin of error of 1.5 percentage points.
The Bright Side/Quaest poll interviewed 2,000 people between October 23 and 25 and has a margin of error of two percentage points.
