CAN ANYONE CONTEST MY CLAIM OF BJP SECURING 245 SEATS ON ITS OWN IN THE ENSUING LOK SABHA ELECTIONS ? BJP = 245+ Seats The ripple effects of Wave 2014 will change the economic and political landscape forever. The results of several opinion polls, large and small, reliable and questionable, all point to one conclusion: a Narendra Modi wave. Of course, they could be wrong, and we all know how such polls missed the emergence of a new party on the Delhi scene. But several, indeed all, opinion polls pointed to a Modi wave in the three other states that went into elections in November-December 2013 — the large states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. The poll forecasts were spot on, albeit with a slight miss on the Modi wave in each of the three states. Overall, the track record of these polls in India is pretty good, and if there weren’t occasional surprises along the way — like the 2004 Lok Sabha election — one would be forced to conclude that opinion polls actually did affect the vote! So, with these opening caveats, let me assume that the opinion polls (about 10 of them, including one by a respected foreign polling agency, Pew) have got it right. What do the results mean? Since elections are fought on a coalition basis, most opinion polls report vote shares for the two major parties, BJP+ and (Congress) INC+. One back-of-the-envelope calculation is to subtract about 3 percentage points (ppt) from BJP+ to obtain the result for the BJP and about 4 ppt from INC+ to obtain the result for the Congress. Doing this, the median poll result is 31 and 19 per cent for the BJP and INC alone, respectively (see table). The joint vote share of the BJP and INC will be close to 50 per cent, a level that all election results since 1984 have centered on (average of 51.5 per cent).
Posted on: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 10:50:29 +0000
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