September 27th, 2026: The Final Countdown, Rail Baltic Reality, and Heating Price Headaches

But the first thing that we have to talk about is the final polling data that has been released for the month of September.

So this is the last polls that will be released before the actual election results.

And I just also want to clarify one thing.

So normally when I've talked about polling data, I've usually gone with the results by the firm SKDS, which conducts polling in cooperation with Latvian Public Media, and they announce their results both on the LTV program Panorama, usually.

and then also on LotBee and Public Media's websites.

And if you have looked at the kind of election guide tool, the spreadsheet that I made, which I released together with the election episode, which is totally free, by the way, go check that out.

If you'd like to learn more about the different parties' platforms, their... list leaders and some links that might be useful, then you can go check that out.

I've also linked to that election tool in this episode description, so you can check that out.

But the polling data that I've put in there has been from SKDS.

There is another polling firm as well called Latvia's Fakti, and the polling data for them actually sometimes is quite a bit different from what skds shows so what i want to do i want to go through both of their kind of top results because overall it's the the big picture is similar within that big picture there are some discrepancies and i think that that's where it's going to be very interesting to see what's actually happens on election night.

And when I say election night, of course, it can take some time for the final results to come in.

As we know, after the municipal elections last year, it wasn't unfortunately so straightforward.

So I'm going to start with the SKDS results just because we've gone along with those the whole time.

So first of all, It's important to point out that the leader has not changed.

That is still Abinotai Saraks, which is the party of the current prime minister.

But their position has more or less stabilized.

So if we looked at the results over the last few months, it had been climbing, climbing, climbing, climbing.

This is the first time since May that there has been a dip in support.

In August, it was 23.6% of voters who had made up their mind.

So again, I want to point out that SKDS gives numbers both in terms of all... out of all of the people that they poll, and always the most popular answer is, I don't know, which this time around, I don't know was at 18.7%, and then I won't participate is at 14.9%.

But then out of people who actually will participate and do know, It is Api Nurtai Sarox, the United List.

So this is the first time out of the last few months out of the people polled that the support has dipped a bit.

This is down from the maximum of 23.6% in August down to 22.7% this month.

I wouldn't be too worried about that.

That seems like a rounding error at best, especially because Latvia's Fakti, which is the other polling firm, which I've talked about, they had 23.8%, which is... slightly even higher than the August amount.