Brazil Municipal Elections (November 15th, November 29th, 2020)

[Mike88]

More results from São Paulo, 57.8% in:

32.8% PSDB
20.4% PSOL
13.7% PSB
10.5% REPUBLICANOS
  9.8% PATRIOTA
  8.6% PT
  1.8% PSL
  1.6% PSD

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

how is the MDB doing?

[Mike88]

how is the MDB doing?

According to my analysis, not as good as in past elections, but looking at the map, they will probably be the party that will be ahead in most cities in the 1st round. They seem to be winning a lot of small/medium size cities. In the big urban areas they are not performing that well, winning in just a few.

[Mike88]

Results are now coming fast. 67.5% nationwide counted. Half an hour ago the number was stuck at 36-40%.

[Mike88]

Rio de Janeiro, almost final, 95.2% in:

37.0% DEM
21.9% REPUBLICANOS
11.3% PDT
11.3% PT
  6.9% PSL
  3.2% PSOL
  2.9% MDB
  2.5% REDE
  1.8% NOVO

[buritobr]

Now we can see the map of the vote in Rio de Janeiro. Benedita da Silva did not so bad in the southern zone (middle class neighborhoods). She was able to hold many Freixo 2016 votes. But her results were a disaster in ther western zone. PT probably though that since she is evangelic, she could break the evangelic stronghold in the western zone. But she couldn't. Crivela had his best results there https://especiaisg1.globo/rj/rio-de-janeiro/eleicoes/2020/mapas/apuracao-zona-eleitoral-prefeito/rio-de-janeiro/1-turno/?_ga=2.188031659.244492886.1605366115-9f4cafc3-7494-6e16-b4a8-8dfe9f41169d

[Red Velvet]

These are practically the final results now for main cities:

São Paulo (99,67% counted):
1. Bruno Covas (PSDB) - 32,85%, runoff
2. Guilherme Boulos (PSOL) - 20,24%, runoff—————————————————————
3. Márcio França (PSB) - 13,65%
4. Celso Russomano (Republicanos) - 10,50%
5. Arthur do Val Mamãe Falei (Patriota) - 9,78%
6. Jilmar Tatto (PT) - 8,65%

Rio de Janeiro (99,99% counted):
1. Eduardo Paes (DEM) - 37,01%, runoff
2. Crivella (Republicanos) - 21,90%, runoff——————————————————————
3. Martha Rocha (PDT) - 11,30%
4. Benedita da Silva (PT) - 11,27%
5. Luiz Lima (PSL) - 6,85%
6. Renata Souza (PSOL) - 3,24%

Belo Horizonte (99,78% counted):
1. Kalil (PSD) - 63,37%, ELECTED——————————————————————
2. Bruno Engler (PRTB) - 9,95%
3. João Victor Xavier (Cidadania) - 9,22%
4. Áurea Carolina (PSOL) - 8,33%
5. Rodrigo Paiva (NOVO) - 3,63%
6. Nilmário Miranda (PT) - 1,89%

Salvador (100% counted):
1. Bruno Reis (DEM) - 64,20%, ELECTED——————————————————————
2. Major Denise (PT) - 18,86%
3. Pastor Sargento Isidório (Avante) - 5,33%
4. Cézar Leite (PRTB) - 4,65%
5. Olivia (PCdoB) - 4,49%
6. Hilton Coelho (PSOL) - 1,39%

Fortaleza (100% counted):
1. Sarto (PDT) - 35,72%, runoff
2. Capitão Wagner (PROS) - 33,32%, runoff——————————————————————
3. Luizianne Lins (PT) - 17,76%
4. Heitor Férrer (Solidariedade) - 4,93%
5. Celio Studart (PV) - 3,54%
6. Renato Roseno (PSOL) - 2,68%

Recife (100% counted):
1. João Campos (PSB) - 29,17%, runoff
2. Marília Arraes (PT) - 27,95%, runoff——————————————————————
3. Mendonça Filho (DEM) - 25,11%
4. Delegada Patrícia (Podemos) - 14,06%
5. Carlos (PSL) - 1,74%

Porto Alegre (100% counted):
1. Sebastião Melo (MDB) - 31,01%, runoff
2. Manuela D’Ávila (PCdoB) - 29,00%, runoff——————————————————————
3. Nelson Marchezan Jr (PSDB) - 21,07%
4. Juliana Brizola (PDT) - 6,41%
5. Fernanda Melchionna (PSOL) - 4,34%

Belém (100% counted):
1. Edmilson Rodrigues (PSOL) - 34,22%, runoff
2. Delegado Federal Eguchi (Patriota) - 23,06%, runoff——————————————————————
3. Priante (MDB) - 17,03%
4. Thiago Araújo (Cidadania) - 8,09%
5. Cassio Andrade (PSB) - 6,88%
6. Vavá Martins (Republicanos) - 6,81%

[Red Velvet]

Now we can see the map of the vote in Rio de Janeiro. Benedita da Silva did not so bad in the southern zone (middle class neighborhoods). She was able to hold many Freixo 2016 votes. But her results were a disaster in ther western zone. PT probably though that since she is evangelic, she could break the evangelic stronghold in the western zone. But she couldn't. Crivela had his best results there https://especiaisg1.globo/rj/rio-de-janeiro/eleicoes/2020/mapas/apuracao-zona-eleitoral-prefeito/rio-de-janeiro/1-turno/?_ga=2.188031659.244492886.1605366115-9f4cafc3-7494-6e16-b4a8-8dfe9f41169d

Yeah, apparently her base was mostly the same PSOL upper middle class base. Saw many shifting from Renata to Benedita as a last time vote.

In retrospect, West Zone of Rio was never going strong for PT or any other left option. Martha had (very slight) more penetration in these areas because of the chief of police status. It’s an electorate that needs to be slowly reconquered so that the margins aren’t so bad but for a good time in the future these places are just gone.

Also, evangelicals will vote based on their religion mostly these days, long gone are the days that economics dictated the politics of Rio. Nowadays it’s basically wealthier South Zone voting for PSOL and other areas voting against PSOL. And the idea of PSOL is what people associate to the left here, not the idea PT has of itself and that used to mobilize the Rio left around 20 years ago. Things changed a lot in the meantime.

PSOL needs to focus on energizing its main base while also trying to moderate in rhetoric to reach out to others, in order to reverse this logic we saw in the 2016 runoff:

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

What's the difference between PT and PSOL, in regards to policies, demographics, ideology, and other things?

[Mike88]

Mayors elected by party:

755 MDB
666 PP
631 PSD
486 PSDB
450 DEM
335 PL
304 PDT
245 PSB
204 PTB
202 REPUBLICANOS
174 PT
137 CIDADANIA
112 PSC
  91 SD
  86 PODE
  85 PSL
  78 AVANTE
  46 PATRIOTA
  45 PC do B
  45 PV
  38 PROS
  13 PMN
    6 PRTB
    5 REDE
    4 PSOL
    1 DC
    1 PMB
    1 PTC

50 cities will go to a second round. 272 still to be declared.
  
Very strong showing also by the Progressives (PP). More 174 mayors than in 2016. MDB, PSDB and PT colapse. DEM also surges as does the PSD

Also, there's a 3 way tie in the national popular vote:

10,905,890 MDB
10,674,476 PSDB
10,605,749 PSD
  8,299,279 DEM
  7,566,444 PP
  6,967,553 PT
  5,317,606 PDT
  5,228,157 PSB
  5,099,228 REPUBLICANOS
  4,671,527 PL
  3,304,721 PODE
  2,789,360 PSL
  2,678,059 PTB
  2,561,918 CIDADANIA
  2,233,374 PSOL

[Mike88]

More cities are being declared and PP is closing the gap with MDB. On the popular vote, PSD could surpass the PSDB and become the 2nd most voted party.

Turnout at 76.8% right now.

[Red Velvet]

What's the difference between PT and PSOL, in regards to policies, demographics, ideology, and other things?

This is the left divide in Brazil:

Basically, PSOL is a socialist party in its soul and name (Socialism and Liberty Party). It was founded by PT defectors around 2005, who were critical of Lula government moving right on some aspects, so they decided to form an opposition to PT from the left.

PT isn’t socialist, it’s mostly a Labour Party who was founded in 1980 by Lula, whose main focus was to promote workers rights, etc. It was more left when it was founded, but after it entered government it moderated and now it’s more for strong social-democracy than anything. PT was founded as a left party with some factions leaning far-left, today they’re center-left at best. However, they still maintain a rhetoric and a history that keeps a strong base within self-declared “leftists”.

PT voter in its origins was working class combined with the intellectual elites. The intelectual elite has mostly abandoned the party now, the working class conditions changed and the group reach diminished since the 80s though (PT used to organize in unions and fabrics, something harder these days). Nowadays their base is loyal lifelong PT voters and Northeast areas that boomed in Lula’s term, especially poorer ones.

Meanwhile, PSOL has the intelectual “elites” now that have long abandoned PT. They tend to be rich or upper-middle class and these voters are from biggest urban cities mostly. The speech of defense of working class from PT has been losing more space to the defense of minorities from PSOL, but figures like Guilherme Boulos keep a lot of the old PT energy and gives hope that PSOL could also be a working class party. I am an optimist.

PCdoB is basically PT sidekick despite the “communist” in the party name.

To the left of all these, PSTU tends to have a pro-anarchism vibe and have more revolutionary stances than all these. But they don’t have major political representation, just like other far-left partes doesn’t. Of the ones with actual power in congress, the most left you’re allowed to go is with PSOL.

You also have the more center-left parties like PDT/PSB/REDE who define themselves these days as “pragmatists” and are more likely to work with the center-right in proposals with the goal of forming a consensus. Some of the left doesn’t like they’re likely to compromise more easily but moderated voices were extremely fundamental in weakening actions and proposals during Bolsonaro government in all fronts.

REDE has Marina and is focused on environmental issues, something that left historically isn’t necessarily more interested in and can overlook easily. It’s a serious mistake for “PT” sectors to ignore what Marina brings to the table with the environment agenda these days because that is a topic bound to become only more relevant.

PDT was founded by Brizola (important antifascist figure during dictatorship) with a tradition of Vargas Labourism and Developmentalism and Ciro Gomes proposals nowadays bring some of that old PDT vibe that used to have during Brizola, before it went to the background and moved center. Ciro also tends to have the most energized rhetoric against Bolsonaro, which helps remembering antifascist roots of Brizola to some. Something that PT has failed IMO, is on a strong passionate denunciation and opposition to the Bolsonaro government, something Ciro was able to use to gain ground on with many “leftist” voters, alongside his structured government project.

Current energized PDT voter who defected from PT doesn’t really identify with PDT of today but the old one. However, they really like Ciro and his ideas and are very passionate about it. Look for example how PDT as a party poorly performed in Rio city council (1 seat, compared to PT’s 3 and PSOL’s 7) but overperformed in the executive, with Martha Rocha winning more votes than PT’s Benedita and PSOL’s Renata.

That’s because the Rio PDT voter (like me lol) voted Martha because of her strong association to Ciro and to his project, which made us pay attention to her project as well. But if I actually liked current PDT structures of Rio, I wouldn’t have chosen to vote for someone from PSOL to city council.

PSB is similar to PDT nowadays without the great leftist history Brizola gave to PDT. They aligned with PDT in 2020 in order to increase both their chances and not run excessive left candidates.

[DL]

What is the "DEM" party?

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Thank you very much for the rundown.

[Mike88]

What is the "DEM" party?

The Democrats, formally called the Liberal Front Party, is a center-right liberal conservative party founded in 1985 by dissidents of the PDS, the successor of the political wing of the military during the 1965–79 dictatorship, ARENA. Since 1994, it has supported all PSDB candidates and has been an ally of them in government.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

How would you describe the PP? And the PSD?

[Red Velvet]

What is the "DEM" party?

It’s the “Democrats” party, a right/center-right one. DEM = Democrats.

Don’t like them at all but they’re better alternative than far-right Bolsonaro candidates or candidates from the “Republicanos” party (like Crivella or Russomanno) who focus way too much on religion and like to appeal to evangelical voters.

In that sense, DEM is replacing these more radical and dumber sectors of the right, which is good. I would rather have DEM canalize the strength of the right like PSDB used to do, since they’re more moderate in comparison to this right that emerged in 2016/2018.

Hell, the Rio left hates Eduardo Paes (DEM), but we’ll definitely support him against Crivella (Rep).

[Red Velvet]

How would you describe the PP? And the PSD?

Big tent parties or “Centrão”. As opportunists with no base ideology who will go towards whatever is more politically convenient at the moment. PP was the most corrupt party during “Car Wash” investigations.

That’s to generalize though, parties can represent different things in different towns. I’ve even seen a PT alliance with PSL (which elected Bolsonaro in 2018) in one interior town. Brazilian politics is very complicated and isn’t defined by ideology at its core, especially with these center parties. It’s much easier to see the divide in the left or in the right.

In Belo Horizonte, Kalil from PSD has big approval ratings and was supported by different figures from the spectrum, including Ciro Gomes. He’s an effective mayor based on what I read, regardless of ideology. In the end that’s what is most important to people. If I were from Belo Horizonte I probably would have voted for him or Áurea Carolina (PSOL).

[buritobr]

In the runoff in Rio de Janeiro, there will be a race between Democrats (the name of Eduardo Paes's party) and Republicans (the name of Marcelo Crivela's party)

[buritobr]

Red Velvet explained well the difference between PT and PSOL and I add a further explanation: I know that many people in this forum watch german politics. So, a good comparison we can make is that PT is similar to the SPD and PSOL is similar to Die Linke

[buritobr]

The left performed bad for the election of many big cities, but had some gains in the election for vereadores.

The distribution of the 55 seats of the Municipal Chamber of São Paulo was: PT 8, PSDB 8, PSOL 6, DEM 6, REP 4, Podemos 3, PSD 3, MDB 3, Patriota 3, Novo 2, PSB 2, PL 2, other 5. PT decreased 1 seat in comparison to 2016, but PSOL increased 4 seats. PSDB decreased 3 seats. Eduardo Suplicy (PT) was the vereador who received the biggest number of votes: 167,552

The distribution of the 51 seats of the Municipal Chamber of Rio de Janeiro was: PSOL 7, DEM 7, REP 7, PSD 3, PT 3, Avante 3, PL 2, PP 2, Cidadania 2, PSC 2, other 13. Despite the fact that PSOL had no competitive candidate for mayor in 2020, this party increased 1 seat in comparison to 2016. Tarcisio Motta (PSOL) was the vereador who received the biggest number of votes: 86,243

[Crane]

Congrats to PSOL for doubling their number of mayors!

[seb_pard]

Good for PSOL, particularly in Sao Paulo, but what are the chances for a Boulos runoff victory? Also how was Manuela D'Avila's performance?


One question regarding NOVO, what happened to that party? I remember they were pretty popular within Faria Lima circles (a negative signal for me) but I lost track on them.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

One question regarding NOVO, what happened to that party? I remember they were pretty popular within Faria Lima circles (a negative signal for me) but I lost track on them.

In terms of performance they picked up some city council seats and had a few good performances like the top voted councilor in Curitiba but otherwise they didn't get into any mayoral runoffs as far as I know and generally underperformed.

The party has a lot of internal tensions. For some reason the leadership ie. Amoêdo decided to heavily micromanage candidate selection, imposed arbitrarily high criteria (you had to be extremely wealthy among other things) and overruled local chapters on the issue. Maybe the goal was to avoid any bozos discrediting the party to the rich people they're so desperate to attract but instead it reduced their enthusiasm pretty drastically.

At risk of generalizing, there are three main currents within Novo. The first is the faction most dominant among the leadership and the central party and could be broadly described as "neoliberal". They talk a lot about "efficiency" and heavily emphasize how little government money they use but aren't particularly ideological. Personally I think these guys would lead Novo to a political dead end like the FDP in Germany, because once you've maxed out on the economically right leaning rich people you've got maybe 10% of the vote and zero appeal anywhere else. They bring a lot of money and highly paid professionals to the party but not much else.

Next would be the supporters of Romeu Zema, the governor of Minas and by far the highest elected official in the party. Zema basically rode Bolsonaro's coattails into the governorship and has generally taken a much more favourable position towards him than Amoêdo. He definitely still has a libertarian/economic liberal streak but he's generally been pragmatic in walking the line between supporting Bolsonaro enough to keep that base while pushing his own policies enough to define himself so his prospects aren't totally tied to him.

Last are the ideological libertarians and economic liberals who compose a measurable portion of elected officials (eg. 2 of their 8 deputies are explicit anarcho-capitalists) as well as a significant portion of the activists and local parties but who lack power within the central party. Naturally they have tension with the "neoliberals" since the latter disqualified a bunch of their candidates on the basis of "insufficient qualification" (it turns out that despite the stereotypes there isn't much correlation between ideological libertarianism and being a tycoon). If they managed to take control they'd basically be inverse-PSoL, but frankly even being inverse-PSoL has better political prospects than whatever the current leadership is aiming for since at least they could conceivably consolidate the "hardcore economic liberal" vote that's been split over a half dozen parties.

On that note, it's hard to say due to that last factor but it looks like economic liberals outside of Novo generally improved. MBL, which was supposed to collapse after going hard against Bolsonaro fairly early on but actually improved in their existing seats and picked up several new ones along the way, something that has led to much wailing and teeth gnashing among the Bolsominions. Maybe the most surprising result of the night for me was
Mamãe Falei pulling almost 10% in SP and very nearly passing Russomano. Imagine someone like Joey Salads getting 10% of the vote to be mayor of New York and you'll understand what a surprising result this is, especially considering Russomanno had the support of the sitting president and widespread media coverage whereas Do Val's campaign basically didn't exist in any media besides the internet.

Besides that, the general trends of the election appear to be that explicitly ideological parties mostly gained at the expense of non/less ideological counterparts (eg. PSoL over PT and PAT/PSC/REP over PSDB) and the left marginally underperformed their poll numbers while the right marginally overperformed.

[DC Al Fine]

What is the "DEM" party?

It’s the “Democrats” party, a right/center-right one. DEM = Democrats.

Don’t like them at all but they’re better alternative than far-right Bolsonaro candidates or candidates from the “Republicanos” party (like Crivella or Russomanno) who focus way too much on religion and like to appeal to evangelical voters.

In that sense, DEM is replacing these more radical and dumber sectors of the right, which is good. I would rather have DEM canalize the strength of the right like PSDB used to do, since they’re more moderate in comparison to this right that emerged in 2016/2018.

Hell, the Rio left hates Eduardo Paes (DEM), but we’ll definitely support him against Crivella (Rep).

What are the demographic/ideological differences between Democrats and PSDB?