Datafolha released its first presidential survey since the campaign formally opened and candidacies were registered, and it has President Lula on 39 percent against Senator Flávio Bolsonaro's 33 in a first round, with the two of them clear of everyone else. Run as a head-to-head, it closes to 47 against 43. Folha, which commissioned the poll with Globo, notes that the gap between the two in the first-round scenario has narrowed by four points since June. The margin of error is two points either way at 95 percent confidence, and the survey is registered with the electoral court under BR-04496/2026. Poder360 published the cost: 307,641.60 reais, paid by Folha's publishing company and by Globo.
Behind the two leaders the field is flat. Ronaldo Caiado takes 5 percent, Renan Santos 4 and Romeu Zema 3; Augusto Cury has 2, and four candidates register 1 each. Blank and spoiled ballots come to 8 percent and 3 percent say they do not know. In the other second-round pairings Lula beats Caiado 47 to 40, Renan Santos 47 to 37 and Zema 48 to 38. Against Flávio Bolsonaro, 9 percent would vote blank or null and 2 percent are undecided.
The rejection figures are almost a mirror. Forty-six percent say they would not vote for the senator under any circumstances; 45 percent say the same of the president. Lula runs ahead among women, 41 to 29, among the poorest, 46 to 27, among older voters, 45 to 32, in the north-east, 53 to 25, and among Catholics, 46 to 29. Flávio Bolsonaro leads among voters who finished secondary school, 38 to 33, among graduates, 37 to 33, in the south, 38 to 33, and among evangelicals. The movement Folha flags is in the south-east, which is 42 percent of the sample: a month ago the region had Lula on 36 and Flávio on 33, and that order has now reversed, within the margin.
One question the published accounts do not settle is when the interviewing stopped. The political event of the week was a series of disclosures from the federal police about the business dealings of Lula's son Fábio Luís, known as Lulinha, which Folha says began on Tuesday the 18th — the day fieldwork opened — and thickened from Thursday the 20th. Folha's own text says the survey finished on Wednesday the 19th, which would put the heaviest days outside it. CNN Brasil and the methodology note in Poder360 both give the field period as the 18th to the 20th. Poder360's subheading says the 18th to the 21st. The three accounts do not agree, so whether this poll caught the second half of that week is not something the published figures can be made to answer.
Datafolha also tested a first round including Pablo Marçal, who obtained a last-minute injunction to join the PRTB but is ineligible over a conviction relating to the 2024 São Paulo mayoral race. The electoral court has already barred him from party funds and television advertising while his registration is judged, a decision due by 14 September at the latest. In that scenario he draws 2 percent and takes one point off Flávio Bolsonaro — whose campaign he had been advising on digital strategy until he launched his own bid.
Why it is on the board
Second on Folha's own most-read list when we collected, with the paper's other Datafolha stories filling several more of its top slots. On g1, the most-read item was an episode of its news podcast on the same federal police investigation that runs underneath the poll — two Brazilian newsrooms whose most-read lists were led by the same political week, taken from opposite ends of it.
Worth saying plainly: the reading list we can see here belongs to the newspaper that paid for the poll. That its readers went to it first is a weaker signal than two unrelated publishers agreeing, and we are counting it as one lens, not two.
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