I am from Brazil, and once there was a Green Party candidate with a real shot at presidential elections, she ended in third, because the candidate that ended being in second made a heavy campaign asking people to vote for him and not "waste" votes on the Green Party that was "never going to win anyway".
They missed their chance though, because after that election the candidate in question tried to appeal to everyone by being so ambiguous that instead made everyone not trust her anymore (for example spousing communist policies and at same time choosing the richest banker in the country as vice-president).
> she ended in third, because the candidate that ended being in second made a heavy campaign asking people to vote for him and not "waste" votes on the Green Party that was "never going to win anyway".
This always happens in single vote systems. Any options who draw from the same subset of voters will divide the vote and weaken their own, and one anothers, chances of success. It's one reason many countries have a few large parties, with internal "subparties" rather than lots of seperate parties that differ only slightly.
Ranked choice voting solves this problem beautifully. It's a real shame it's not widely used for elections.
In our case elections work by having two "rounds", in the first one the top 2 candidates go to the second round, and then people vote for one or the other.
This means that the "vote division" thing is not really an issue... If you end in second place, you still get a shot to get all the votes of whoever doesn't want to vote for the first place.
Thus basically any candidate in second place trying to campaign saying the vote will be "divided" is basically bullshitting the voter base in an attempt to secure his second place.
The first place DO want to concentrate votes though, if you end with more than 50% of the votes (and Brazil has mandatory voting, so basically 50% of voters) then you win outright, so sometimes parties DO attempt to do this by pooling all their votes toward one candidate (for example several xxx-wing parties choosing only one candidate among them all and campaigning all of them for that same guy).
Don't forget scaring away most of her leftist supporters by getting too cozy with megachurches; At least it sounds like you're talking about Marina Silva lol
They missed their chance though, because after that election the candidate in question tried to appeal to everyone by being so ambiguous that instead made everyone not trust her anymore (for example spousing communist policies and at same time choosing the richest banker in the country as vice-president).