Except in Jammu and Kashmir, the Bharatiya Janata Party has been the clear front-runner in every election in the country starting in December 2013. This peaked with the Lok Sabha polls in 2014, where the BJP logged a massive majority and firmly established the existence of a Narendra Modi wave, which would go on to wash over Maharashtra, Haryana and Jharkhand. As Delhiites prepare to vote on February 7, however, opinion polls seem to suggest that the Aam Aadmi Party has take some of the wind out of Modi sails.
The race appears to be neck-and-neck, with most polls giving the edge to AAP. An average of five major opinion polls gives AAP 41.5% of the vote share, with the BJP following up at 39% and the Congress a distant third. Across the polls in recent days, only the India TV-CVoter poll gives the BJP more votes than the AAP, while the Hindustan Times-Cfore survey has both getting 38% of the vote share.
Vote shares tend to be the more accurate portions of these sort of opinion polls, since turning these numbers into an actual seat count is much harder. Many, for example, predicted a high vote share for the AAP in the December 2013 elections in Delhi, but the projected seat counts all came out much lower than the party’s final tally of 28.
Nevertheless, the pollsters still attempt to arrive at an estimate, and here too, the AAP seems to have a clear advantage. An average of the opinion polls, taking the midpoint for those that predicted ranges, suggests Arvind Kejriwal’s party will get 35 seats in the 70-member assembly, followed by 30 for the BJP and 5 for the Congress.
The surprising thing about all of this is the massive comeback the AAP has seemingly managed to pull, although only the final numbers can confirm these sentiments. The BJP managed to take a huge chunk of the vote share during the Lok Sabha elections and, as recently as November, it looked as if it would run away with the polls in February. Tracking the ABP-Nielsen poll over the last few months, however, shows how the AAP has slowly eroded that lead until now it is projected to get more than its rival.
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The race appears to be neck-and-neck, with most polls giving the edge to AAP. An average of five major opinion polls gives AAP 41.5% of the vote share, with the BJP following up at 39% and the Congress a distant third. Across the polls in recent days, only the India TV-CVoter poll gives the BJP more votes than the AAP, while the Hindustan Times-Cfore survey has both getting 38% of the vote share.
Vote shares tend to be the more accurate portions of these sort of opinion polls, since turning these numbers into an actual seat count is much harder. Many, for example, predicted a high vote share for the AAP in the December 2013 elections in Delhi, but the projected seat counts all came out much lower than the party’s final tally of 28.
Nevertheless, the pollsters still attempt to arrive at an estimate, and here too, the AAP seems to have a clear advantage. An average of the opinion polls, taking the midpoint for those that predicted ranges, suggests Arvind Kejriwal’s party will get 35 seats in the 70-member assembly, followed by 30 for the BJP and 5 for the Congress.
The surprising thing about all of this is the massive comeback the AAP has seemingly managed to pull, although only the final numbers can confirm these sentiments. The BJP managed to take a huge chunk of the vote share during the Lok Sabha elections and, as recently as November, it looked as if it would run away with the polls in February. Tracking the ABP-Nielsen poll over the last few months, however, shows how the AAP has slowly eroded that lead until now it is projected to get more than its rival.
