The age group above 60 years is the only one in which the president appears numerically ahead; young people give Lula an advantage
The record of 2 million young voters who took the title this year, announced on Thursday (May 5, 2022) by the TSE, tends to help the former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (EN) in this year’s elections.
The age group of 16 to 24 years is what gave PT the biggest advantage in the last survey PowerDate: 19 points more than the president Jair Bolsonaro (PL).
Newcomers with optional voting (16 and 17 years old) tend to attend the polls more than average. Similarly, the group of elderly people, in which Bolsonaro does best, is the one who abstains the most.
The only age group that gives Bolsonaro a numerical advantage in polls is people over 60. The president marks 35% of voting intentions against 31% for Lula (a tie at the limit of the margin of error).
Some of them have an optional vote (those over 70 years old). Septuagenarians are often absent on polling day: the abstention rate of this group (8% of the electorate in 2018) was a very high 62.6% in 2018.
When considering the entire group over 60 years, abstention was 36.3%, the highest among age groups.
Abstention in the youth group, the one where Lula currently has the widest advantage, was 19.4% in 2018.
The TSE still hasn’t finished counting the electorate, but, with this year’s record of registrations, the age group from 16 to 24 years will be reinforced in the electoral registration.
Abstention can turn an apparent advantage among older voters into an overall disadvantage. The 2018 elections had more elderly people registered to vote than young people (27.7 million against 22 million). But a smaller contingent of the older group attended the polls (17.6 million) than the age group up to 24 years old (17.9 million).
The 45-59 age group is, at the moment, Lula’s greatest asset. They have weight in the electorate (they represented 27% of voters in 2020) and historically have the lowest abstention. In 2018, only 13.2% were absent from the polls. In this group, Lula is 12 percentage points ahead of Bolsonaro.
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