Electoral strategies of Ryszard Grobelny and Jacek Jaśkowiak in the second ballot in the light of exit polls

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze election strategies of two candidates for the office of President of Poznań, who competed in the second round of local elections in 2014. The author tries to answer the following questions: (1) between the first and second round, could Ryszard Grobelny have turned the tide of events and ultimately won the election? and (2) what mistakes did he commit in the last period of the campaign to have so clearly lost to Jacek Jaśkowiak? While answering these questions, we formulated two hypotheses. The first one is that it is impossible to clearly determine whether Ryszard Grobelny had a chance to win after such a low score in the first ballot, although there are indications that the key to victory was not so much the complaints of Ryszard Grobelny, but the decisions of other candidates, who did not qualify for the second round. The second hypothesis leads to the conclusion that the biggest mistake at the end of the campaign was the then incumbent President’s turn in the direction of the PiS party electorate and Tadeusz Dziuba. Verification of these hypotheses, in particular the second one, was based on the analysis of exit polls, carried out on the evening of the day of the second round of elections for the president of Poznan by the Gemini agency, commissioned by Wielkopolska Cable Television.