“Lula, at the age of 80, acquired his first smartphone in the final two weeks of the campaign… A young congressman, very close to Lula but kept at arm's length during the first round, was liberated to build out a digital army. He took a group of some 50,000 people and renamed it Lula's Army. By the end of the campaign, this group had 10 million people. If you had to point to one thing that turned Lula's campaign around, it was that.”
The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026
Context
Asked what turned Lula from trailing after Brazil's first round to winning the runoff, Winter credits a WhatsApp-driven operation run by a small group of young aides, which politicians across Latin America now want to copy.
Transcript
…of Brazil. But there have been so many parallels really since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and then the election of Jair Bolsonaro two years later. So I think there's a lot that our countries have in common as well. So when it comes to why we should care, I would start with those things.
…of surprising turnaround. And one last follow-up. The U.S. midterms are, as this is released this week. So is there anything in how Lula turned this around that America Can on either side should also kind of pay attention to? What do you think of the three weeks between the first and second round?
…days for me because I certainly, you know, we all sensed that the momentum was shifting in Lula's direction, but none of us expected it would swing quite this much. And I do wonder if there are lessons for Democrats in the United States or perhaps anybody anywhere looking to run a campaign in 2026 where the technological landscape has changed so much. And I would start with this basic fact. Lula, at the age of 80, acquired his first smartphone in the final two weeks of the campaign. And, you know, part of your audience may think, whoa, why didn't he have one before? And that's a good question. You know, he was an old school politician, really a man of the 20th century. That was when he had his political rise, was during the 1970s and the 1980s. But this is also a story of a modern digital operation that came out of nowhere in the space of three weeks between the first…
But to that point, I'd love to ask you: how much do you think this win we can credit to Lula himself versus how much do you think he was simply writing like an anti-Bolsonaro wave? And for some context, there's like high rejection to the Bolsonaro name in Brazil because of their association with an…
I'm not sure Lula himself knows the answer to that question as we sit here today. This is what everyone's trying to figure out. I mean, look, there are philosophical questions. That you've raised about why people vote the way they do. Do they go into the ballot box thinking, oh gosh, I'm so happy…
Yeah, I'm sure. I mean, I was born in 2001, so I have never known Brazil without Pete, which is Lula's party. Most of it was Lula himself, except for the four years of Polsonado we had in 2018 to 22.
More from The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
