In the last week, the dispute over the issue began to occupy more space in the political debate. Whether due to pressure from some parties in search of space on the ticket in a year in which two seats per state will be up for grabs, or due to the uncertainty regarding who the candidates will be in some states. To this is added the .
There is still little research on the chances of pre-candidates for the Senate. But the signs of uncertainty multiply. The former governors of Rio de Janeiro and the Federal District, who decided against their positions with the aim of running for a seat in the Senate, appear to have given up. One due to legal uncertainty, the other to avoid having its image even more linked to the .
In , for now, only two candidacies are considered certain: those of federal deputies () and (New).
Salles must run as an independent candidate, without the support of the governor. The right can still put forward a second name linked to the governor’s support coalition, but is waiting for Jair to anoint a candidate.
The left, led by the candidacy for the state government of , needs to decide whether it will emerge united or fragmented. The Rede federation announced, while the PSB works with the pre-candidacies of and Márcio França.
The race for the Senate in 2026 could become a trap for groups that do not coordinate, and this trap tends to be more dangerous for the opposition, which in most states is at a disadvantage in the race for government.
There are few political science studies dedicated to competition for the Senate. Given this gap, I invited Miguel Lian and Cedric Antunes, my colleagues from FGV Cepesp, to analyze the patterns of results in this dispute between 1998 and 2022. The results show that candidates launched by the winning governor’s coalition have a significant advantage: their probability of election is around 53 percentage points higher than that of candidates running outside this field. In years when there are two seats up for grabs, the governor’s coalition elects at least one senator in half of the cases and wins both seats in 29% of cases.
In light of these results, in states like , where the governor running for re-election is in a very favorable position, the election for the Senate can function as a dispute for just one effectively open seat. One of the seats tends to gravitate towards the governor’s coalition. The other will depend both on campaign strategies and on the capacity for internal coordination between political groups.
The logic of the Senate race does not reward diversity of candidates. It rewards the concentration of votes. The challenge is not to allow voters’ votes to be diluted among many names from the same political group.
The choice must be between coordinating, reducing the number of candidacies and joining forces, or dividing the votes and handing over the seat to their opponents.
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