The strategist claimed Nawrocki’s strength lies with his working-class background, which makes him feel at ease while meeting “normal people,” be they rural women, local firemen, or “anyone, really, who grew up in a block of flats,” a typical reference to unprivileged life in Poland.
“Trzaskowski is the candidate of the elites, he just doesn’t understand where people like Nawrocki are coming from,” Szefernaker said.
The theme of the elites versus the people is one that PiS is likely to keep hammering in Nawrocki’s campaign, which has so far focused heavily on small-town and rural Poland. The party is aiming to paint Trzaskowski as an out-of-touch liberal, denouncing him for taking crosses out of Warsaw government offices and strongly backing LGBTQ+ rights.
However, Trzaskowski does bring a lot of experience to the race. He came pretty close to winning the presidency in 2020, losing to Duda by some 400,000 votes, or just over 2 percentage points, after a campaign that his backers said was unfair because of PiS’s control over public media, which heavily favored Duda.
Trzaskowski also isn’t shying away from hitting the road and facing ordinary people. On one morning he was filmed in a campaign event helping a farmer load his truck with crates of vegetables.
Polls of Poles
Early polling shows Trzaskowski with a commanding lead. One survey has Trzaskowski with 38.6 percent support, while Nawrocki has 23.3 percent, while another poll, concerning a hypothetical run-off vote between the two, has Trzaskowski at 46 percent and Nawrocki at 34 percent.