Ten Million Strong: What Brazil's Record LGBTQ+ Vote Teaches the American Midterms

On October 4, 2026, Brazilians did something that the American right insists cannot be done. They sent a Black transgender woman back to Congress with more votes than any woman has ever won in the history of the country's Chamber of Deputies. Erika Hilton, a federal deputy from São Paulo for the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), took 1,596,472 votes. She beat the old record, set in 2018, by more than half a million.

Hilton did not win alone. A record 519 openly LGBTQ+ candidates ran across Brazil this year, up 59 percent from 2022. Together they drew more than 10.7 million votes. Thirty-five of them won seats, including 14 members of the National Congress. That is the largest openly queer delegation in any national legislature in the Americas.

Five days before Americans vote on November 3, the numbers carry a message. Gui Mohallem, who leads the Brazilian group VoteLGBT, made the case in The Advocate on October 28: the far right's war on trans people is not a winning formula when the people it targets organize, run and turn out.

From the Street to the Record Books

Readers of our profile Born to Lead know Hilton's story. Thrown out of her family home as a teenager, she lived on the street before she found her way to college, to activism and then, in 2020, to São Paulo's city council, where she won about 256,000 votes. Two years later she became one of the first trans women elected to Brazil's Congress.

Her 2026 total is not just a personal win. It is the second-highest vote count in São Paulo state, the most populous in Brazil, and one of the highest in the nation. Voters who backed her chose a Black, working-class travesti who chairs the Chamber's committee on women's rights. They did so in a race where the far right spent years painting people like her as a threat to families.

How the Wave Was Built

The surge did not come out of nowhere. Groups like VoteLGBT and the Instituto Plena Cidadania spent years training candidates, tracking races and pressing parties to put queer candidates on their lists. For the first time, Brazil's Superior Electoral Tribunal asked candidates about sexual orientation and gender identity when they registered, and 406 said they were LGBTQIA+. Independent trackers counted more than 500.

The wave was also political, not just personal. VoteLGBT found that 79 percent of these candidates ran with parties of the left. They ran on housing, wages, health care, police violence and racism, not only on identity. The same election sent more than 100 women to the Chamber for the first time. It also handed Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva a runoff victory on October 25 over the movement built by Jair Bolsonaro, as we reported in Black Brazil at the Ballot Box and Defending the Vote.

In Brazil, race and gender identity are not separate fights. Most Brazilians are Black or brown, and the country is also the deadliest place in the world for trans people, year after year. Many of those killed are Black travestis. Hilton's campaign spoke to both facts at once, and voters heard it.

The View from Here

Now look north. In the United States, anti-trans bills have become a staple of right-wing campaigns. As we detail in Targeted by Law, the Human Rights Campaign counts more than 399 trans and gender-expansive people killed since 2013. About 59 percent were Black trans women. Laws that ban care, police bathrooms and erase trans people from public life do not stay on paper. They make an already dangerous life more dangerous.

The strategy behind those laws assumes that trans people are a small, isolated group that can be made into a target without cost. Brazil's election shows the flaw in that bet. When queer and trans candidates are tied to broad coalitions of Black, poor and working people, attacks on them can become a reason to vote, not a reason to retreat.

That is Mohallem's point to Americans. Brazil's far right did not lose because it went quiet on gender. It lost ground because the people it attacked built a political home and filled it.

Not a Happy Ending, Yet

None of this means Brazil has solved its violence. Hilton herself has faced death threats, and trans Brazilians still face murder rates far above the rest of the population. Votes do not guarantee safety. Laws, police reform, jobs and health care do. The test for the new Congress is whether 14 queer members, and a record number of women, can turn record votes into protection on the ground.

But the ballot is where that work starts. Black Brazilian voters, and Black trans women like Hilton, just showed how much weight they carry when they are organized. On Tuesday, American voters get their own chance to answer the same question.

Votes in a democracy are not a gift from the powerful. They are a tool the targeted can pick up and use.

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