James Bosworth on What Comes After Lula's Stunning Win

When we last talked to James Bosworth, it seemed like an “orange wave” was going to take over Latin America and further realign the region’s interests with those of the Trump administration. But with Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s surprise victory in Brazil’s presidential election last month, and opposition leader María Corina Machado’s return to Venezuela, it now looks like the orange wave might be cresting. Bosworth — a non-resident fellow at the Stimson Center and the author of the Latin America Risk Report newsletter — comes back to the show to explain how Lula pulled off his upset win over Flavio Bolsonaro, the impact of Machado’s return to Venezuela, and why 2027 might further reshape the politics of Latin America. See Odd Lots live in NYC on Dec. 9. Tickets on sale! https://events.bloombergevents.com/event/OddLotsNYC/summary See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:13Tracy Alloway?

  Hey there, Odd Lots listeners. Tracy Alloway here.

• 1:15Joe Weisenthal?

  And Joe Weisenthal.

• 1:17Tracy Alloway?

  We have had an absolutely amazing year and we've gotten to see some of our listeners, meet some of our listeners across the country at some of our live shows. But we are very excited because we are coming back home to NYC for another live recording.

• 1:35Joe Weisenthal?

  We have a really exciting lineup of perfect guests, including Lina Khan, Pablo Torre and Adam Toos, and we really hope to see you there.

• 1:43Tracy Alloway?

  Yep, so join us on December 9th at City Winery for another live taping of the Odd Lots podcast. Tickets are now on sale at Bloomberg.com/oddlots.

• 1:54Joe Weisenthal?

  Or check the show notes here for a direct link. And either way, hope to see you there.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

• 2:17Joe Weisenthal?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

• 2:21Tracy Alloway?

  And I'm Tracy Alloway.

• 2:23Joe Weisenthal?

  So we're recording this on November 3rd, Election Day in the US. But there's really much to talk about during the election day itself. Everyone just waiting?

• 2:32Tracy Alloway?

  It's a bit of an anticlimax, isn't it? You wait for Election Day and then like, nothing really happens until much later.

• 2:38Joe Weisenthal?

  Something might happen, but yeah, nothing happens during the day. So the day of Election Day is actually a really good time to just talk about a bunch of other stuff.

• 2:45Tracy Alloway?

  Talk about other elections.

• 2:47Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, to talk about other things that are going on because nothing really happens that day. But we did recently have other elections, as you hinted at, in Brazil.

• 2:54Tracy Alloway?

  That's right. So we had a very, very surprise victory by Lula over Flavio Bolsonaro. And then Flavio Bolsonaro escaped.

• 3:04Joe Weisenthal?

  He fled, yeah.

• 3:05Tracy Alloway?

  He fled and is now in the US. So that's a really interesting question, like what that means for Brazil-US relations. The other thing that's been happening is Venezuela, right?

• 3:16Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 3:16Tracy Alloway?

  So right before we came on this podcast, there was a headline out of the New York Times saying that the US was in discussions to set up a military presence in Venezuela.

• 3:27Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, interesting, interesting.

• 3:28Tracy Alloway?

  So you know, that raises questions as well over whether or not like Venezuela is basically becoming a protectorate of the US, I guess.

• 3:36Joe Weisenthal?

  So they're right. So one of the things that we know is that the Trump administration, or at least the State Department, has this sort of weird, maybe surprisingly friendly relations with Delcy Rodriguez, the successor to, the successor to Maduro, who we captured and now have in custody in New York earlier this year. And so, but like recently, like there's been the return of the Democratic challenger there.

• 4:04Tracy Alloway?

  The opposition leader, yeah.

• 4:05Joe Weisenthal?

  The opposition leader, et cetera. So it's sort of an interesting time to like, catch up. Did we use this time?

• 4:12Tracy Alloway?

  Let's talk about other American elections.

• 4:14Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's talk about other.

• 4:15Tracy Alloway?

  South American elections.

• 4:17Joe Weisenthal?

  Politics elsewhere in the hemisphere. Anyway, very excited to have back on the podcast. We talked to him earlier this year. James Bosworth, he's a non-resident fellow at the Stimson Center and is the author of the excellent newsletter, The Latin America Risk Report. James, thanks so much for coming back on Odd Lots.

• 4:33Speaker 05

  Thank you for having me.

• 4:34Joe Weisenthal?

  Just tell us, like, how did Lula win after, you know, even going into that day, all the math and polls and everything thought it was pretty clearly going to be Flavio Bolsonaro?

• 4:45Speaker 05

  So there are two answers to that.

• 4:46Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 4:47Speaker 05

  One is that Flavio was a terrible candidate. And the other was that Lula was a great candidate. So let me run through those both, right? Flavio was a terrible candidate. In fact, when I was here in New York the last time, I gave a presentation elsewhere and someone asked, what could Flavio Bolsonaro do better? And I said, change his last name. There's an element in which being a Bolsonaro was a weight on him. And I mean, you go back and his father, Jair Bolsonaro, former president, was accused of, convicted of being involved in a coup attempt in 2022, 2023. And if you remember January 8th, 2023, very similar to January 6th, 2021, there was a big event in Brasilia where a mob of protesters took over, you know, took over various buildings in the capital. And so Jair Bolsonaro was convicted of that.

• 5:32Speaker 05

  But Flavio has had issues. Five years ago, he was, he was accused of money laundering while he was a congressman. Earlier this year, he was connected to Daniel Volcaro, who was the head of Banco Master, which was a big financial scandal in Brazil, and took, was caught on WhatsApp asking for millions of dollars from this banker.

• 5:49Tracy Alloway?

  Seems bad.

• 5:50Speaker 05

  It was bad. Right before the election, there was a Brazilian magazine that tied him to pharmaceutical lobbyists and prostitutes on a boat. And then even when he fled from Brazil, the plane he flew from Argentina to the US on was connected to a money laundering investigation inside of Argentina and a drug trafficking case in Texas.

• 6:10Joe Weisenthal?

  I want to get into all these details, but just going to, like, all of this was true prior to the first round.

• 6:17Speaker 05

  Most of it, yeah.

• 6:17Joe Weisenthal?

  Right? So all of these negatives on him were in the case when he came in first during the first round of voting. So where did something go change? Or what was the mechanism via which that didn't translate to the final round?

• 6:33Speaker 05

  Across the last six years, eight years in Latin America, really across much of the world, we've been in an anti-incumbent environment. Everything is a referendum on the incumbent. And Lula da Silva was sitting at 45% in the polls. And the first round was really a referendum on Lula. It wasn't about Flavio Bolsonaro. In some ways, coming in first place in the first round was the worst thing that could happen to Flavio Bolsonaro because all of a sudden, all of the attention got put on him and it let Lula catch up from behind, shook up his campaign and gave him the opportunity to win.

• 7:03Tracy Alloway?

  Didn't he shake up his campaign strategy as well? I heard he hired a social media manager, put, put younger people in charge of some of it, the WhatsApp group.

• 7:12Speaker 05

  He got his first cellphone. Lula had never had a smartphone before. Yes, they started Lula's Army, a WhatsApp group that had, I think, 10, over 10 million people on it. Over 5% of Brazilian voters were on this WhatsApp group. And the day of the election, when there were various shenanigans on both sides, everybody plays dirty tricks, but certain mayors blocked the bus service. The WhatsApp group got into mode and started driving voters to the polls. Things like that really mattered. And Lula, who had never really understood social media, even though Brazil is the most online country potentially in the entire world, Lula had really, he nailed it during the debates. He hit these little 30 second clips that were perfect to share on social media. I don't know if he did it intentionally or not, but it was perfect.

• 7:55Joe Weisenthal?

  Some people just have that. You know, it's interesting what you say about this sort of like anti-incumbent bias working against Bolsonaro due to him having won the first round. I saw some people speculate, you know, in universe B where the US is a different electoral system, whether Trump would have won in 2016 had the first round been like, okay, let's narrow it down to the final two, kick off all the random third parties like, oh, like, it's going to be Trump. Like, maybe not, you know? It's like, you never really know. But I could, I sort of get that, what you're saying. Like, it's sort of like resetting the expectations of who the president is.

• 8:32Speaker 05

  Right, I mean, usually across two round elections, usually the first round winner wins. But occasionally, I mean, the reason you have the second round is so these things can happen, so voters can, can have that moment. And so the president can build a potential majority coalition for themselves.

• 8:45Tracy Alloway?

  Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't you have a Bolsonaro win as your base case?

• 8:49Speaker 05

  So I had Bolsonaro winning the night before the election. I had Bolsonaro winning at about 64%. So prior to the first round, I was essentially coin flip.

• 8:57Joe Weisenthal?

  You thought he was 64% chance to win, not 64%.

• 9:00Speaker 05

  Exactly. 64% chance to win. And the prediction markets were at 80%.

• 9:04Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, they were.

• 9:05Speaker 05

  In fact, there was a moment where the prediction markets hit 87% for Bolsonaro. And so there's always this element of, you know, who got it less wrong.

• 9:13Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 9:13Speaker 05

  Becomes a real question in some of these prediction market things. And I know that this was a big miss for the prediction markets.

• 9:18Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 9:18Speaker 05

  Right? I mean, you always wonder, was this the 20% shot that happened? Or did they miss? I will tell you, they missed. They were overconfident on this election. I missed. I wish I had been, I wish I had been lower on the Flavio odds.

• 9:30Joe Weisenthal?

  But you obviously thought that Lula had a real chance of winning.

• 9:33Speaker 05

  Oh, absolutely. You know, better than a third, right? The chance of winning. And the reasons were, I mean, you could see him slowly catching up in the polls and you could see his campaign just doing well generally. Now, I can't base a prediction on vibes. All of the data, all of the polls said Flavio Bolsonaro was going to win. And so, I mean, based on the first, in the first round data, it looked like Flavio winning. But, you know, you have to sort of factor in, okay, but he's catching up. And the polls seemed to be herding together and correlated. And there were other issues as well. So that all went into the model.

• 10:03Tracy Alloway?

  How much of the miss by prediction markets and pollsters, I guess, had to do with, I guess, surprise voters actually turning out in the election? Because it seems like maybe a lot of people who weren't polled actually turned up and voted for Lula.

• 10:18Speaker 05

  So on one hand, it's really small numbers. The change in turnout from the first round to the second round was less than 2%. And you had a slight shift in terms of non-voters, people who cast blank or invalidated ballots the first round. You had another 1% or 2%. But in Brazil, that's a couple million votes. And in an election won by 4 million votes, you know, a shift of 1% or 2% across those rounds really did make the difference.

• 10:40Joe Weisenthal?

  Wait, what's the deal with Bolsonaro's stepmom?

• 10:43Speaker 05

  Michelle?

• 10:44Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. What was the deal? I saw in your newsletter, you mentioned something she said or did didn't help the race. What was that all about?

• 10:49Speaker 05

  So early on, Michelle Bolsonaro, who's a stepmom, Michelle Bolsonaro had, and she won a senate seat, by the way, during this past election.

• 10:56Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, good for her.

• 10:56Speaker 05

  But she and Flavio had a little fight.

• 10:58Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh.

• 10:59Speaker 05

  And then they made up. And now she's considering changing parties potentially, which is also odd to leave the Bolsonaro party when her last name is Bolsonaro. But she and Flavio had this just spat in which it seemed like Flavio was not respecting her. And because Flavio was already weak among women voters, this did not help the odds for his campaign. He, across the whole campaign, he had setback after setback. It's actually impressive. He did as well as he did in the first round. But, you know, his campaign, he was also very professional. If you watched him in the debates, he was very well coached. He didn't answer the questions, but that's typical in a lot of debates across democracies. He was very well coached. He did not do poorly in the debates.

• 11:36Tracy Alloway?

  Well, speaking of Bolsonaro's party, are you seeing like a fracturing there? Because I think he's rejecting the results of the election from the US where he now is. But meanwhile, his party has accepted the result, right? So like, his own party has accepted the result that he's rejecting. What does that mean?

• 11:56Speaker 05

  The fracturing is not as bad as it was four years ago. Which, I mean, four years ago, after Flavio, or after Jair's attempted coup, there was a real fracture. You saw a lot of centrist parties jump in and support Lula. It gave Lula big support for the first year of his presidency in this most recent term. This time, you do see, it's not a fracturing, but it's a recognition, I think, that maybe the Bolsonaro's shouldn't be the candidates in 2030, right? They're already playing this out and saying, we need to figure out a strategy. Because everybody knows that if the candidate had been Tarcísio de Fertes, who won the governor of Sao Paulo, or any other right wing candidate, they would have, that person would have defeated Lula. I feel convinced of it. Every Brazilian analyst feels convinced of it.

• 12:39Speaker 05

  So the question is, how do we avoid running the Bolsonaro's in 2030 so that somebody else can run? Because that candidate will be a stronger candidate than anyone with the last name of Bolsonaro.

• 13:04Speaker 00

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• 14:04Speaker 01

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• 15:11Joe Weisenthal?

  I have a question, and this is something I know nothing about. It's not even really related to the election specifically. In fact, it's one of those things you read an article about every once in a while and forget. After Brazil, they did badly in the World Cup this year, and I saw a bunch of people on social media complaining or tweeting like, oh, Brazil hasn't been good at soccer ever since the Catholic population of the country has declined. These evangelicals can't play soccer. This is just tweets that I saw. Can you talk a little bit about the sort of like politics and the rise, like the historical rise? I mostly associate Latin American countries with Catholicism, but I know these are like data takes.

• 15:53Joe Weisenthal?

  And that across Latin America, there's been a pretty big rise in like American-style evangelical Christianity, et cetera. Can you talk a little bit about who that demographic is, like that shift, that wave, et cetera?

• 16:05Speaker 05

  And it's hard because the evangelicals also correlate somewhat more with rural voters in certain areas. But the urban voters, as occurs in the United States in some ways, right? But the evangelical rise in Brazil has definitely created a divide inside of the electorate. And you saw it, every poll, there's not really exit polls in the same way we have in the US. But every poll in Brazil showed that the evangelical community largely voted for Bolsonaro and the Catholic community largely voted for Lula. And, but as evangelicals and Catholics are getting close to parity in Brazil.

• 16:36Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. So what has driven that though? Like, what is the long-term structural driver of the growth of evangelical Christianity across Latin America?

• 16:44Speaker 05

  To self-define their evangelical, they are constantly recruiting.

• 16:48Tracy Alloway?

  They're self-promoters, Joe.

• 16:51Speaker 05

  And the Catholic Church, I think, has fallen behind on certain aspects of that. I think the other aspect of this is, and there's elements of the Catholic Church in the United States and in Latin America that are quite conservative, small c conservative in terms of how they view social policy. And Lula's coalition is much more small L liberal in the sense of, in the sense of they will support gay marriage. Though, you know, there's, and I think that divide has caused the Catholic Church to have some drop in Latin America and in Brazil, while the evangelical community has taken advantage of that.

• 17:24Tracy Alloway?

  The last time we had you on this podcast, you talked about an orange wave or the idea of a bunch of Latin American leaders sort of aligning themselves with Trump and striking deals and all of that. With the surprise result in Brazil, does that mean that the orange wave has crested, I guess, or is Brazil an exception?

• 17:45Speaker 05

  It's a great question. Everyone's watching Argentina next year to find out what the answer to that is. So there's sort of two questions here, right? One is this idea that there are a bunch of pro-Trump leaders who have won, and whether that was because they were, there's been a shift to the right, or a shift, just a pendulum in an anti-incumbent environment. I tend to be the latter explanation. Trump was going around saying he was nine for nine in elections recently. He just pulled that number out of the air. But it's relatively close to how he had done prior to Brazil. There's still going to be, for the next two years, an orange shift, in the sense that you have this element of every Latin American leader, right, left, center, must respond to Trump. He forces them to respond, right? So even though Lula has won this election, and the

• 18:28Speaker 05

  election did not go Trump's way, and Trump is now trying to back away a bit from Bolsonaro, you have this, you have Lula da Silva having to work with Trump, having to respond to Trump, having to deal with tariffs. You have Claudia Scheinbaum in Mexico having to do the same. Everyone has to respond to Trump, whether or not they agree with him, and that's still going to define the following two years, until Trump leaves office in January 2029.

• 18:49Joe Weisenthal?

  How much has the Iran war specifically flipped the sign, so to speak, about the value of being good friends with Trump, or in Latin America?

• 19:02Speaker 05

  So it really hasn't impacted, Latin American leaders are not responding to Trump's Iran war directly. At the same time, the Iran war has driven up oil prices and fuel costs around the region, which is just bad for incumbents generally.

• 19:19Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, I see.

• 19:20Speaker 05

  When you have higher fuel costs or higher inflation in Latin America, every incumbent is going to suffer. And that's what you've seen in Chile and Colombia and Peru.

• 19:27Joe Weisenthal?

  But it's just inflation. There's not, because you don't think it goes a little bit further where it's like, yeah, here's this guy that you went to the White House, and you're buddy, buddy with him, and this war that he started, which almost no one around the world, except for the United States and Israel, really care about, has caused inflation to get to rise. That hasn't created a political penalty, in your view, for politicians who made the choice to be friends with Trump?

• 19:56Speaker 05

  It doesn't seem to have mattered in any of the polls I have seen. What you do see are people are angry at inflation. But people aren't making the big, logical leap necessarily. But all elections are local, and local incumbents get blamed for inflation. Therefore, higher gas prices, whether it's caused by the Iran war or something else, get blamed on the incumbent. Now, one interesting twist for Brazil. Brazil is very much in commodity exporting economy. If there have been higher commodity prices over the last six months, they're exporting oil, they're exporting soy. They have benefited in some ways from the Iran war. I mean, certainly, the Caribbean and Central America have been hit hard. Brazil, its sort of net effect is sort of a wash, actually. And that may have helped Lula, though it's going to be a long time till we really are able to look at the data to understand that.

• 20:41Tracy Alloway?

  Should we talk Venezuela?

• 20:42Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:43Tracy Alloway?

  All right. So going over to Venezuela, we have Machado, who's come back. And now people are talking a little bit, a tiny bit, about the potential to have elections over there. And I saw on Polymarket, there's like, an 8% chance being priced.

• 20:57Joe Weisenthal?

  Of an election.

• 20:58Tracy Alloway?

  Of an election by the end of the year, which is fairly soon now. It's November.

• 21:03Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 21:03Tracy Alloway?

  But you're a super forecaster. What number would you put on it?

• 21:08Speaker 05

  This year, there's not going to be an election. There's really going to be, there's about a six to nine month run-up for any election that has to happen, because there are steps that must occur. And now, I worry about those steps being drawn out over years and years and years, where they just keep kicking the can down the road. But it should be about a six-month timeframe, right? So the current Rubio plan, as it exists, I say Rubio, not Trump, very specifically, the current Rubio plan, is that Delcy Rodriguez will declare a vacancy in the presidency. There will be a new electoral board, and six months later, there will be elections. Elections would ideally happen in July of next year, but maybe they get pushed to September or November of next year. I think

• 21:49Speaker 05

  that's the ideal. What would Delcy Rodriguez like? Probably closer to 2028 or 2029. And so this is the fight that's going on, I think, right now, inside, between Rubio and the Venezuelan authorities, and inside the US government, between Rubio and other aspects of the Trump administration. Because I do think that there are people within the Trump administration who would like to see that election delayed. But I know that Rubio wants it on his record, that Venezuelan democracy happened on his watch. And so he will be pushing hard, I think, for elections in the coming year.

• 22:21Joe Weisenthal?

  So one of the things that I read in your newsletter, which I, you know, hadn't clicked, is that, or hadn't really thought of before, is that, you know, there had been a lot of criticism in Brazil and around the world towards Lula for having been too friendly with Maduro. But you sort of flip the sides again. It's like, all right, Delcy, part of Maduro's party, kind of chummy with Trump, maybe that allows Lula to create some space, maybe becomes an advocate for some sort of version of Venezuelan democracy. Talk to us about that link.

• 22:56Speaker 05

  So there's an element in which Lula has called for new elections in Venezuela. And he was way too friendly with Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro, and various other left-wing dictators across the hemisphere. He has been for much of his career. He can't be happy with how things are going in Venezuela, right? South America is Brazil's sphere of influence. And right now, Trump is treating Venezuela like a proxy colony in some ways. And so I think that Lula would like to see some sort of independence by Venezuela from the US authorities. And he thinks that a new election would potentially benefit him in that way, whether or not that election goes left, right, or center.

• 23:35Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, sure, yeah.

• 23:36Speaker 05

  That said, the Venezuelan opposition hates Lula, right? They blame Lula for a lot of what went wrong, the reason that they were not able to get a transition over the years. And so it's unlikely you'd see a Machado-Lula hug fest, in that they get along. But they could become quiet allies of each other in this quest to push Venezuela towards elections.

• 23:55Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, can you just explain what influence exactly Brazil has over Venezuela, or what leverage they actually exert here?

• 24:03Speaker 05

  That's a great question. So Lula, Brazil is Latin America's largest economy. It shares a border with Venezuela. Hypothetically, you know, for years under Chavez and Maduro, there were tens of millions of development contracts that went from Brazil to Venezuela. And Brazil's construction companies constructed a bunch of Venezuelan infrastructure. Brazil should be influential in Venezuela. The fact that they haven't been is the surprise. They are the biggest military in South America. They're the biggest neighbor for Venezuela. They're the largest economy. They should be the most influential player in South America in Venezuela. But under Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil stepped back from a lot of the diplomatic

• 24:47Speaker 05

  efforts to push transition. And then under Lula, they did very little after Maduro stole the 2024 election. And so both the right and the left in Brazil have taken that step back from what should be influence in South America. And I think Lula may want to reassert it, because as presidents late in their second term often do, when they become lame ducks, they turn towards foreign policy, because it's where they have the influence.

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• 27:33Joe Weisenthal?

  Setting aside democracy and all that, what's happening with oil and the corporate money? And is there evidence of the oil majors, et cetera, actually looking at Venezuela as a real opportunity for growth? Or is the story still that all the talented petroleum engineers left a long time ago? The infrastructure isn't in place. It's still too uncertain. It's mostly noise. Where do you stand on that?

• 27:56Speaker 05

  The oil majors are looking, but they're not jumping it. All right. Chevron is in. Chevron was in before. Chevron will be in for the next 50 years. The rest of the oil majors, including Exxon and Conoco, who were kicked out under the Chavez era, they're interested. Venezuela is a sea of oil, right? It would be a great place to go. Nobody wants, none of the larger firms want to go into Venezuela prior to some sort of certainty that their contracts will be respected. And so what you see instead are the NABEP, which is the company that Alejandro Betancourt currently runs. The companies that are going in are small. They're not quite wildcatters, but they are the sort of companies that aren't there for the long run. They're there for the quick deals.

• 28:40Speaker 05

  And I think that as we look for, you know, how is Venezuela going to recover? How is Venezuela going to rebuild? You're not going to rebuild with a company that has never done serious oil drilling elsewhere in the world. And so one of the reasons for, to push for democracy in Venezuela is the fact that you do not get the oil majors to come in until they have that rule of law certainty. And they know that they're, that a 10-year investment or a 30-year investment is going to be able to stick and not just change two years from now when the government changes.

• 29:05Tracy Alloway?

  Speaking of rule of law, I mentioned that headline that came out just before we started recording this, but the New York Times reporting that the US is in negotiations for a potential military presence in Venezuela. What does that actually mean?

• 29:20Speaker 05

  So as I understand it, it's a status of forces agreement, which doesn't necessarily mean a permanent military base or military presence. Instead, it would be an agreement for the US military to be there to train, to operate, to provide support, and maybe to engage in certain operations. There was just an operation a couple of days ago against an ELN camp near the Colombia border. It looks like the US assisted the Venezuelan military in that. The US wants these agreements so that we have legal certainty for what happens to the US soldiers when they are in country. And the Trump administration would like that, that deal signed so that we can feel more comfortable having US military presence in the region. But it doesn't mean like a permanent base by any means. At least that's not how I read it. They could change that tomorrow. But how I read it today is just a basic agreement.

• 30:05Joe Weisenthal?

  What would happen if there were a free election held tomorrow in Venezuela?

• 30:08Speaker 05

  Maria Corina Machado would win.

• 30:10Joe Weisenthal?

  Unambiguously?

• 30:11Speaker 05

  Yes. There's essentially no doubt that if you were to put Maria Corina Machado versus Delsi Rodriguez tomorrow in an election, better than 90%, assuming everything was free and fair, Maria Corina Machado wins. And the odds go up the more you allow for Venezuelan expats to vote. That's just inside of Venezuela, which I think, I think it's important to note. There are a lot of Venezuelans who have left the country. About a quarter of the population has left the country over the last 10 years.

• 30:35Joe Weisenthal?

  Were she to become president at some point in the next couple of years? What would be, what would she do? Like, what would substantively would be the change of course?

• 30:44Speaker 05

  There's a lot to be done in Venezuela. And so first off, she needs to consolidate her control with the military and the police. And this is, I think, a big reason why the Trump administration didn't go with her originally is they weren't sure that she would have the respect of the armed forces. And I'm not defending their policy, but that was the reason that they gave, was that they knew that Delsi Rodriguez would have control of the military and they weren't sure Machado would. And so Machado has to show that she can control the security forces. Then she needs to fix the economy. And the economy is a wreck. It's one of the biggest economic collapses in world history that we've seen in Venezuela. That includes fixing the currency. That includes getting new oil investments. That includes fixing the economy outside of the oil economy as well. Venezuela, you know, there are other sectors that need to be fixed. And she needs to restore democracy.

• 31:29Speaker 05

  And that includes having multiple parties. It's not, it can't just be the chavistas and the opposition forever. There should be a wider range of democratic parties. And she needs to somehow restore the checks and balances, which means she probably loses the next election or her party does. And that's a really hard thing to ask any politician to do is to set up a system, knowing that you may be creating the environment where your, where your party loses because of how the political pendulum will work.

• 32:00Tracy Alloway?

  I know we implied in our intro that we weren't going to talk about the US elections, North American elections, but you're a super forecaster. We're recording this on November 3rd. I kind of feel like we have to ask for an actual number.

• 32:14Speaker 05

  So the Democrats are going to take the House.

• 32:16Joe Weisenthal?

  We're recording this at 2:59 PM, November 3rd.

• 32:19Speaker 05

  I am 96% certain the Democrats are going to take the House of Representatives. I feel very confident in talking about what it means for the Democrats to take the House of Representatives. The Senate is closer to a coin flip than Nate Silver, who you had on last week, that said the possibility for a blue wave is definitely there, but it's not certain yet. So I can't make a call in the Senate, but I can definitely make a call in the House. It's going democratic.

• 32:41Joe Weisenthal?

  Last question. What else should we be looking for Latin America for the coming months? Any other elections coming up or anything?

• 32:47Speaker 05

  There are local elections in Ecuador. That sounds really boring, like Mayor, Mayor of, Mayor of Quito.

• 32:52Joe Weisenthal?

  We'll do an episode on the, like, run up our preview episode for the Mayor of Quito episode. That sounds fun.

• 32:58Speaker 05

  El Nino is hitting Ecuador right now. And Ecuador, two years ago, had a series of blackouts and they just started having power outages right now, which is not good for local elections and how they're going to function in Ecuador. So we have local elections in Ecuador. And then next year, we get elections in Guatemala and elections in Argentina. And everybody's going to be watching the runups of the elections in Argentina because the start of this most recent right-wing wave, if you want to call it that, was Javier Malay. And so whether Javier Malay can win reelection or Argentina goes towards a different path is going to start defining the next pendulum swing in Latin America.

• 33:33Joe Weisenthal?

  All right. James Bosworth, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. Thanks for coming in studio. Really appreciate you taking your time.

• 33:40Speaker 05

  Thank you. I forever.

• 33:54Joe Weisenthal?

  That was fun. I really liked talking to James. It actually makes a lot of sense. The first round was an election about Lula. And then the second round was an election, a referendum on Bolsonaro.

• 34:05Tracy Alloway?

  Everything makes sense in hindsight.

• 34:07Joe Weisenthal?

  No, no, I agree.

• 34:08Tracy Alloway?

  It's still really surprising, like, the prediction market's got it so, so wrong.

• 34:12Joe Weisenthal?

  No, and of course, we can all, that's James's story of how he got it wrong. But I kind of buy it as a, like, sort of, what would explain the electorate to shift in a short period of time? It's like, oh, we don't like this Lula guy. It's time for someone new. And then it's like, oh, okay, new guy wins. Oh, yeah, but it's Bolsonaro. And then the vote turning, it kind of makes sense to me.

• 34:33Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah. To me, the big question is like, what does this mean for the orange wave?

• 34:38Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 34:38Tracy Alloway?

  Right? And I take James's point that you have to deal with Trump in one way or another, if you're South America, because he finds a way to sort of insert himself into everything. But is that going to be political? Like, would aligning with him be as politically popular now as it used to be?

• 34:57Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I know.

• 34:58Tracy Alloway?

  That's the question.

• 34:59Joe Weisenthal?

  Look, you know, at some point, actually, we should do an episode on super forecasting, which I don't know anything about. So someone's like, oh, you're a super forecaster. What's your thing? Actually, don't even, that's a whole subculture of people who are really good at forecasting. So I'm never going to doubt a super forecaster. You know, it's like, hey, I'm not one. But I still find it hard to believe that there isn't a penalty in much of the world for being seen as too chummy with Trump at a time when Trump's war with Iran has driven up costs for everyone around the world. I think like the polling for Nigel Farage, for example, in the UK has been sliding because he's seen as been too Trump-friendly, et cetera.

• 35:43Joe Weisenthal?

  So who knows what's going to happen there? It still makes you want, yeah, like, yes, in the meantime, you got to work with him, of course, and you have to like, take him seriously, et cetera. But from a electoral standpoint, I don't know. I find it implausible that anyone really like wants to be too friendly with him in going into an election.

• 36:05Tracy Alloway?

  Except maybe for Rodriguez.

• 36:07Joe Weisenthal?

  Except maybe for Rodriguez. Right. It's all very strange.

• 36:10Tracy Alloway?

  All right. Shall we leave it there?

• 36:12Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's leave it there.

• 36:13Tracy Alloway?

  This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.

• 36:18Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at TheStalwart. Follow our guest, James Bosworth, at BloggingsByBos. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez, at CarmenArmed, Dash O'Bennett, at DashBot, Kale Brooks, at KaleBrooks, and Kevin Lozano, at KevinLloydLozano. And of course, you can chat about all of these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots. And for more Odd Lots content, check out our daily newsletter, which you can find at Bloomberg.com/oddlots.

• 36:45Tracy Alloway?

  And if you enjoyed this conversation, if you like it when we talk Latin American politics, if you want us to do a regional Ecuador election episode, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And if you're watching on video, then please leave a comment or like, or better yet, subscribe.

• 37:04Joe Weisenthal?

  And remember, if you're a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there.

• 37:14Tracy Alloway?

  Thanks for joining.

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