Poll reveals smaller gap between Romanian presidential candidates compared to first ballot’s outcome

The gap between the frontrunner in Romania’s presidential elections, isolationist nationalist George Simion, and its challenger with a pro-EU orientation, Nicuşor Dan, is smaller than 10 percentage points (pp): 54.8% versus 45.2% of the voters committed to attending the second round, according to a poll carried out by Verifield and published by Nicuşor Dan.

The gap seems significantly smaller compared to the wide advance marked by Simion in the first round, which it won with nearly 41% of the votes compared to Dan’s score of under 21%.

However, the bigger picture revealed by the Verified poll is more complex and points to a very large number of non-answers: 14.7% said they didn’t know/decided, 8.9% refused to answer, 4.9% opted not to attend the vote, and 1.4% said that they would annul their vote.

Thus, some 30% of the electorate are potential voters with an option not yet known. For comparison, 38.9% of those polled opted firmly for George Simion and 31.3% for Nicuşor Dan. Only the 14.7% share of undecided voters could totally reverse the score or triple the advance of George Simion.

The smaller gap between the two candidates in the Romanian presidential elections, compared to the second round, is explained by the large number of voters opting for Nicuşor Dan out of the electorate that supported the other candidates. Even the voters of Victor Ponta – a candidate with a declared nationalist view – opted instead for Nicusor Dan).

(Photo: Andrii Yalanskyi/ Dreamstime)