The current Rubio plan as it exists. I mean, I say Rubio, not Trump very specifically. The current Rubio plan is that Delcy Rodriguez will declare a vacancy in the presidency. There will be a new electoral board, and six months later there will be elections. Elections would ideally happen in July of next year, but maybe they get pushed to September or November of next year. I think that's the ideal. What would Delcy Rodriguez like? Probably closer to 2028 or 2029. And so this is the fight that's going on, I think right now inside between Rubio and the Venezuelan authorities and inside the US government, between Rubio and other aspects of the Trump administration, because I do think that there are people within the Trump administration who would like to see that election delayed. But I know that Rubio wants it on his record that Venezuelan democracy happened on his watch. And so he will be pushing hard, I think, for elections in the coming year.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway. So we're recording this on November 3rd, Election Day. You asked. But there's not really much to talk about during the Election Day itself, and we're just waiting.
It's a bit of an anti-climax, isn't it? You wait for election Day and then, like nothing really happens.
But something might happen. But yeah, nothing happens during the day. So on the day of Election Day is actually a really good time to talk about a bunch of other stuff that other elections you didn't talk about other things that are going on because nothing really happens that day. But we did recently have other elections, as you hinted at in in Brazil.
That's right. So we had a very, very surprised victory by Lula over Flavio Bolsonaro. And then Flavio Bolsonaro escaped. He also he fled, and is now in the US. So that's a really interesting question like what that means for Brazil, US relations. The other thing that's been happening is Venezuela, right?
Yeah. So right before we came on this podcast, there was a headline out of the New York Times saying that the US was in discussions to set up a military presence in Venezuela.
Oh, interesting. So, you know, that raises questions as well over whether or not, like, Venezuela is basically becoming a protectorate of the US like a true vassal state, but. So. Right.
So one of the things that we know is that the Trump administration, or at least the State Department, has this sort of weird, maybe surprisingly friendly relations with Delcy Rodriguez, the successor to Maduro, who we captured and now have in custody in New York earlier this year. And so but like recently, like there's been the return of the Democratic challenger there, the opposition leader, opposition leader, etc. So it's sort of an interesting time to like, catch up on, did we use this time? Let's talk about other American elections. Let's talk about South American politics elsewhere in the hemisphere. Anyway, very excited to have back on the podcast. We talked to him earlier this year, James Bosworth, he's nonresident fellow at the Stimson Center and is the author of the excellent newsletter, The Latin America Risk Report. So, James, thanks so much for coming back on Odd Lots.
Just tell us, like, how did Lula win after, you know, even going into that day, all the math and polls and everything thought it was pretty clearly going to be Flavio Bolsonaro.
So there are two answers to that, okay. One is that Flavio was a terrible candidate, and the other was that Lula was a great candidate. So let me run through those polls, right. Flavio was a terrible candidate. In fact, when I was here in New York the last time I gave a presentation elsewhere and someone asked, what could Flavio Bolsonaro do better? And I said, change his last name. There's an element in which being a Bolsonaro was a weight on him. And, I mean, you go back and his father's a former president was accused of of being a convicted of being involved in a coup attempt in 2022, 2023. And if you remember, January 8th, 2023, very similar to January 6th, 2021, there was a big event in Brasilia where a mob of protesters took over, you know, took over various buildings in the capital. And so Jair Bolsonaro was convicted of that. But Flavio has had issues. Five years ago, he was, he was accused of money laundering while he was a congressman. Earlier this year, he was connected to Daniel Vaccaro, who was the head of Banco Master, which was a big financial scandal in Brazil and took millions, was caught on WhatsApp asking for millions of dollars from this banker.
It was bad. Right before the election. There's a Brazilian magazine that that tied him to a pharmaceutical lobbyists and prostitutes on a boat. And then even when he fled from Brazil, the plane he flew from Argentina to the US on was connected to a money laundering investigation inside of inside of Argentina and a drug trafficking case in Texas.
I want to get into all these details, but just going to like all of this was true prior to the first round.
So all of these negatives on him were in the case when he came in first during the first round of voting. So what is where did something go change or what was the mechanism via which that didn't translate to the final round
across the last six years, eight years in Latin America, really across much of the world we've been in an anti-incumbent environment. Everything is a referendum on the incumbent. And Lula da Silva was sitting at 45% in the polls, and the first round was really a referendum on Lula. It wasn't about Flavio Bolsonaro. In some ways, coming in first place in the first round was the worst thing that could happen to Flavio Bolsonaro, because all of a sudden all of the attention got put on him and it let Lula catch up from behind. It shook up his campaign and gave him the opportunity to win.
Didn't he shake up his, campaign strategy as well? I heard he hired a social media manager, put put younger people in charge of some of it.
The WhatsApp group, he got his first cell phone. Lula had never had a smartphone before. Yes. They started, Lula's army, a WhatsApp group. They had, I think ten, over 10 million people on it. Over 5% of Brazilian voters were on this WhatsApp group. And the day of the election, when there were various shenanigans on both sides, everybody plays dirty tricks. But but certain mayors blocked the bus service. The WhatsApp group got into mode and started driving voters to the polls. Things like that really mattered. And Lula, who had never really understood social media, even though Brazil is the most online country potentially in the entire world, Lula had really he nailed it during the debates, he hit these little 32nd clips that were perfect to share on social media. I don't know if he did it intentionally or not, but it was perfect.
You know, it's interesting what you say about this sort of like anti-incumbent bias working against Bolsonaro due to him having won the first round. I saw some people speculate, you know, and universe be where the US is a different electoral system. Whether Trump would have won in 2016 had the first round been like, okay, let's narrow down to the final two, cook off all the random third parties, like, oh, like it's going to be Trump like, maybe not. You know, it's like you never really know. But I could I sort of get that what you're saying. Like it's sort of like resetting the expectations of who? The president. Right.
I mean, usually across two round elections, usually the first round winner wins. But I mean, the reason you have the second round is so these things can happen so voters can can have that moment. And so the president can build a potential majority coalition for themselves.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't you have a Bolsonaro win as your base case? So.
So I had Bolsonaro winning the night of the day for the before the election. I had Bolsonaro winning at about 64%. So prior to the first round, I was essentially coin flip. I had a 64% chance to win.
Yes, yes, exactly 64% chance to win. And the prediction markets were at 80%. Yeah. And in fact, in fact, there was a moment where the prediction markets to 87% for Bolsonaro. And so there's always this element of, of, you know, who got it less wrong.
Yeah. Becomes it becomes a real question in some of these prediction market things. And I know that that this was a big miss for the prediction market.
I mean I mean you always wonder was this the 20% shot that happened or did they miss?
I will tell you, they missed. They were overconfident on this election I missed I wish I had been I wish I had been lower on the floor. You know, obviously thought that Lula had a real chance of winning.
Oh, absolutely. You know better than a third, right? No chance of winning.
And the reasons were I mean, you could see him slowly catching up in the polls and you could see his campaign just doing well. Generally. Now, I can't base a prediction on vibes. All of the data, all of the polls said Flavio Bolsonaro was going to win. And so, I mean, based on the first in the first round data, it looked like Flavio winning. But, you know, you have to sort of factor in, okay, but he's catching up and the polls seem to be herding together and correlated. And there's there were other issues as well. So that all went to the model.
How much of the miss by prediction markets and pollsters, I guess, had to do with, I guess surprise voters actually turning out in the election because it seems like, maybe a lot of people who weren't polled actually turned up and voted for Lula.
And when he had it's really small numbers. The change in turnout from the first round to the second round was less than 2%. You got a slight shift in terms of nonvoters people who cast blank or invalidated ballots. The first round, you had another 1 or 2%, but in Brazil, that's a couple million votes and an election won by 4 million votes. You know, a shift of 1% or 2% across those rounds really did make the difference.
Wait, what's the deal with Bolsonaro? Stepmom? Michelle? Yeah. What was the deal I saw in your newsletter? You mentioned something she said.
Or did so so, so, so, so, so early on. Michelle Wilson, who's a stepmom, Michelle was in our hat and she won a Senate seat, by the way, during this past election. But but she, she and Flavio had a little fight, and then they made up, and now she's considering changing parties, potentially, which is also odd to leave the Bolsonaro party. When her last name is Bolsonaro. But. But she and Flavio had this just spat in which it seemed like Flavio was not respecting her. And because Flavio was already weak among women voters. This did this did not help the odds for his campaign. Across the whole campaign, he had setback after setback. It's actually impressive. He did as well as he did in the first round. But you know, he his campaign, he was also very professional. If you watched him in the debates, he was very well coached. He didn't answer the questions. But that's typical in a lot of debates across democracies. He was very well coached. He did not do poorly in the in the debates.
Well, speaking of Bolsonaro's party, are you seeing like a fracturing there? Because I think he's rejecting the results of the election from the US where he now is. But meanwhile his party has accepted the result. Right? So like his own party has accepted the result that he's rejected. What does that mean?
The fracturing is not as bad as it was four years ago. I mean, four years ago, after Flavia or after Zaire's attempted coup, there was a real fracture. And you saw a lot of centrist parties, jump in and support Lula. It gives Lula big support for the first year of his presidency in this in this most recent term. This time, you do see, it's not a fracturing, but it's a recognition, I think that maybe the Bolsonaro shouldn't be the candidates in 2030. Right? They're already playing this out and saying, we need to figure out a strategy, because everybody knows that if the candidate had been Takis, you referred to us who won the governor of Sao Paulo or any other right wing candidate they would have, that person would have defeated Lula. I feel convinced of it. Every Brazilian analyst feels convinced of it. So the question is how do we avoid running the Bolsonaro in 2030 so that somebody else can run? Because that candidate will be a stronger candidate than anyone with the last name of Bolsonaro.
Interesting. I have a question. And this is something I know nothing about. It's not even really related to the election specifically. In fact, it's one of those things you read an article about every once in a while and forget after, Brazil, they did badly in the, in the World Cup this year. And I saw a bunch of people on social media complaining or tweeting. They're like, oh, Brazil hasn't been good at soccer ever since the Catholic population of the country has declined. These evangelicals can't play soccer. I and this is just tweets that I saw. Can you talk a little bit about the sort of like politics in the rise, like the historical rise? I mostly associate Latin American countries with Catholicism, but I know these are like dated takes and that across Latin America there's been a pretty big rise in like, American style evangelical Christianity, etc. Can you talk a little bit about who that demographic is like that shift, that wave, etc.?
And it's hard because the evangelicals also correlate somewhat more with rural voters in in certain areas, because in urban voters, as occurs in the United States, in some ways. Right. But the evangelical rise in Brazil has definitely created a divide inside of the electorate. And you saw it every poll. There's not really exit polls in the same way we have in the US. But every poll in Brazil showed that the evangelical community largely voted for Bolsonaro, and the Catholic community largely voted for Lula. And but as evangelicals and Catholics are getting close to parity in Brazil,
what is driven that, though, like what is the long term structural driver of the growth of evangelical Christianity across Latin America
