Election of the Weekend I: Poland
By 
Two weeks ago, we got unexpectedly good news out of Romania. Against expectations largely created by the ugly first round results, the candidate of Europe, Ukraine, and general sanity defeated the Putinist with Trumpian characteristics, by what ended up being not that close of a margin, 54-46. The same day saw the first round of the Polish election, covered here, and the results were somewhat less happy. As expected, Tusk’s Civic Platform ally Rafał Trzaskowski, came in first, but only a couple of points ahead of the PiS-aligned candidate, Karol Nawrocki. The 3rd and 4th place candidates, both far right, combine with Nawrocki for ~50%. Earlier second round polling had Trzaskowski ahead by low double digits, but it now looks like a tossup, with a perhaps ever so slight edge for Trzaskowski. The stakes were covered in my earlier post, but to re-iterate; two of Tusk’s key promises and goals, re-legalizing abortion and a suite of reforms to restore the rule of law and the courts after a decade of PiS vandalism, will not meaningfully progress until there’s a president who gets out of his way. We’ll find out Sunday evening, possibly Monday morning, if the Polish people will let Tusk do the work that badly needs to be done for Poland.
As it’s pledge drive weekend, let me start out by thanking everyone who’s been reading this series, and especially those who happen to know more than I do about the election of the day and offer useful background and analysis in the comments. As many of my co-bloggers have pointed out today, your support helps make this happen. Let me be a little more specific about the causal mechanism here. In this blog’s early years, I was a pretty prolific poster, probably averaging 5-10 posts a week, most of them substantive. We weren’t making any money back then, so there no real payouts to writers. Unlike some of my remarkably prolific colleagues, I found it difficult to keep up the pace, and became a much more occasional poster. By the time this site was noticeably income-producing, I wasn’t posting much at all, although I checked in, usually, at least once every month or two. At some point, Rob and Scott decided to start paying me a small percentage of the income, in part in honor of the work I’d put in building up the site’s readership in the early years. It wasn’t much, but it had a secondary effect: it motivated me to try to make more of a regular active contribution. The effectiveness of that motivation waxed and waned over the ensuing years, but it was definitely a motivating factor. I started this series on a bit of whim, but it served three purposes for me. First, it gave me structure: these are the posts I need to write, and this is when I need to write them. Second, I semi-regularly teach the “Introduction to Comparative Politics” course at Dayton. Regular readers may recall that the primary focus of my scholarship and teaching is political theory; a sampling of my work in that area, in collaboration with Scott, is available in the silent auction. But comparative politics has always been a field of secondary interest and a lot of fun to teach. Mostly I teach 5-7 out of a rotating set of around a dozen case study countries (some combination of UK, France, Germany, China, Russia, India, Iran, Nigeria, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, South Africa) but I’ve recently created an assignment around an election that happens during the semester, which means expanding the field a bit. Third, for a variety of reasons I suspect many readers will sympathize with, I wanted to shift the focus of my “follow politics closely” practice to something other than American politics. The series has been somewhat less effective on the third motivation than I might have liked, given the Trump administration’s obnoxiously global footprint (I failed to mention above Kristi Noem campaigning for Nawrocki at “CPAC Poland”), but it’s nonetheless been an enjoyable experience. I’m not sure I’d have had the motivation necessary to stick with the series, without some income, however, modest, attached to my work for the site. So, please contribute, and thanks for your support. As always if there’s a subnational or otherwise obscure election you’d like to see covered, please let me know and I’ll do my best to cover it.