ANJL/Nexus poll: Brazil’s betting ban changed just 1% of first-round voters’ choices

A new Nexus poll commissioned by the Associação Nacional de Jogos e Loterias (ANJL) says the government’s push to ban bets had little electoral impact: among first-round voters who knew about the measure, only 6% said it changed their candidate, or about 1% of the electorate. For PSPs and payment teams in Brazil’s high-risk stack, the useful part is not the campaign drama but the gap between political noise and actual voter behavior.

1. The survey, titled Impacto das Bets nas eleições presidenciais, was conducted by Nexus – Pesquisa e Inteligência de Dados between 18 and 21 October by phone, with 2,000 people aged 16 or older. The margin of error is 2 percentage points, with a 95% confidence level. The statistician in charge was Neale El-Dash.
2. Among respondents, 90% said they had seen, read, or heard about bets during the presidential campaign, and 62% said they had heard “a lot” about them. Still, the topic ranked only sixth among the most discussed issues in the race, mentioned by 20% of respondents.
3. When it came to voting priorities, bets dropped to 13th place out of 14 topics, with 9% of mentions. Health and the SUS led with 43%, followed by public security at 38%, the end of the 6×1 shift schedule at 27%, corruption and education at 25% each, and cost of living at 24%. Only the environment ranked lower, at 6%.
4. For 55% of respondents, the issue is important, but only 14% place it among the main topics of the election. Another 42% said it is little or not important at all. In other words, the ban was visible, but it was not a top-tier voting driver.
5. The poll also shows a large information gap. Nearly a month after Provisional Measure No. 1.394/2026 was issued on 25 September, 65% of respondents said they had heard about some recent federal government decision on bets. But when asked openly what that decision was, 88% of that group named the ban. That means only 57% of the population identified the measure spontaneously. Awareness was weaker among the very groups the government says it wants to protect: 52% of those with household income up to one minimum wage did not know of any decision, and the same was true for 52% of those with only primary education.

The vote data point in the same direction. In the first round, 18% of voters who knew about the measure said the ban influenced their choice, equal to 9% of the total sample. But 84% of that group said it only made them feel more confident about the vote they already intended to cast; only 6% changed candidate. The same pattern appears in the second round, scheduled for Sunday (25), where 22% said the ban will influence their vote after hearing an explanatory text about the MP, with 14% saying it will reinforce an existing choice.