Polish Politics and Elections

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exit poll by age

The typical right-wing populism voting pattern.

Is it? The usual pattern for the National Front, or the AfD, or the Sweden Democrats (and I think for Wilders' PVV) is strength with middle-aged voters and weakness with the very young and the very old. PiS has patterns typical of a conservative party of government in eastern Europe, but I don't think that's the same thing as right-wing populism. (For instance when the Slovakian Social Democrats -- who notwithstanding the name did not actually have positions all that different from PiS -- were defeated earlier this year their greatest strength was also with older voters).

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So as I understand it, the bad guys lost?

Per exit polls, which are normally pretty good in Poland, yes but narrowly. However the actual counting is going extremely slowly.

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Who actually votes for TD? I understand agrarianism in the post-communist 1990s context, but in most places these sorts of parties went away and their supporters went on to vote for what we would think of as "populists". Why did Polish agrarianism both survive and end up as part of the relatively 'liberal' coalition?

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So Tusk is now certain to become PM again? The 3 parties aiming to oust PiS obatin 54% of seats now, which is an insurmountable advantage.

Kind of ironic that this would be the 2nd time Tusk ended the PiS reign, he already did so in 2007 when Kacysnki himself was his predecessor as PM.

There is the chance that the PiS president ends up calling for new elections after first giving PiS the mandate for government (which would fail), but I think such an election would only reinforce the opposition’s position as they could easily hammer on PiS not willing to listen to the 53-54% that disagree with them and instead calling a costly new election.

Israel shows that doing this doesn't change opinions,  it just hardens the previous loyalties and makes everyone angrier.  You need to give people time, which Bibi sadly benefited from, after letting the shaky opposition into power for a brief window.

Fear runs deep in Israeli psyche though, in a way it doesn't in established Western democracies, so entrenchment may be context-specific.

We also have the example of the 2019 Istanbul mayoralty, where the dominant party re-ran elections for no good reason and got clobbered. (Not that it did much good in the long run, since the winner Imamoglu has been sentenced to gaol time...)
Then there's Sánchez gambit 4 months after the last GE, in which his coalition took serious losses too.

The thing about the Israeli elections is that the outcomes really were unworkable (except the very first one, April 2019, after which Likud really should under normal rules have been able to put together a coalition -- and it was punished in September 2019 for not doing so); unworkable elections indeed tend to have people dig in their heels, as also happened in Bulgaria. There's a difference between "electorate, please try again" and the governing party not liking the result and calling for a revote on a technicality, like in Turkey. That never goes well.

Going for an early election if your polls look good is variable -- it sometimes works and it sometimes doesn't -- but hardly ever does it work before around half the term is up, and it's more likely to work if the governing party has a new leader or a coherent reason to seek a new mandate rather than just "polls look good right now", which backfires pretty often. (The latter still sometimes works -- Canada 2000 is a blatant example -- but it's fundamentally risky.)