The Constituencies of Lula and the PT: The Big Split

The debate about the distancing between Lula & the Workers Party (PT) gained acceptance in the 2006 election, when the popularity of Lula & his government did not extend to the PT, as expected. For the first time the party did not improve performance in the voting for the Chamber of Deputies regarding the previous election. We analyzed the electoral bases of Lula & the PT in the last four elections for president & federal deputies (1994-2006), & we prove the distancing between them. We studied the spatial distribution of votes at the municipal level with maps, statistics & spatial regression. We identified the detachment of the candidate's & party's electoral territories every election, & the regressions measured the growing spatial-temporal independence of the votings: the coefficient fell from 0.85 in 1994 to 0.15 in 2006. There was a process of geosocial distancing in the period 1994 to 2002, & a "divorce" between the electoral bases in 2006 when the territories seemed to be nearly unrelated to each other. Adapted from the source document.