The Aam Aadmi Party knows better than most that an election isn’t over till it’s over. As campaigning comes to a close in the city, the opinion polls and the mood in the capital seem entirely on the party’s side. The Bharatiya Janata Party seems to be getting more desperate by the day. People are talking as if the AAP has won the Delhi elections already, with party chief Arvind Kejriwal and other leaders talking of them grabbing more than 40 seats out of 70 in the Assembly.
That is, of course, campaign bluster. Especially with this election coming as a follow-up to the 2013 polls, when no single party managed to get a full majority, both the AAP and the BJP want to project themselves as the party that will get more than half the seats in the capital.
But that election, back in 2013, was also significant for another reason: no one came even close to predicting the final tally for the AAP. Opinion polls in the run-up to that election gave an average of 15 seats, although the party actually ended up getting 28. Most pollsters also predicted 24 seats for the Congress, which finished with one-third that number.
Now much of this was because pollsters tend to undercount the voices of the urban poor, often because those in the community are reluctant to openly state their choices. “Members of marginalised communities often misrepresent their views out of intimidation and fear of reprisal from the often urban interviewers. This is apparently the reason Mayawati’s electoral base is always under-represented in polls,” the Caravan reported, in a comprehensive piece on the art and science of opinion polls a couple of years ago.
But while the AAP was clearly underestimated and the Congress overestimated, it’s important to point out that the 2013 polls also got the final results wrong for the BJP. An average of the polls gave the saffron party 29 seats, when they would actually end up with 32.
In the Lok Sabha elections too, although the distortions were not as blatant, pollsters underestimated the strength of the BJP’s support base, particularly under Narendra Modi. Of the seven seats in Delhi, the opinion poll average predicted 6 seats for the BJP and 1 to the AAP, when in fact, the former ended up winning all seven quite comfortably.
So while the opinion polls might be a good indicator of sentiment, they are by no means an accurate predictor of what exactly will happen, especially when the margin in 10 seats in the capital was a matter of just 2000 votes. The AAP, having been on the receiving end of this for so long, would be smart not to suddenly now presume that the opinion polls are going to be an accurate indicator of the final results.
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That is, of course, campaign bluster. Especially with this election coming as a follow-up to the 2013 polls, when no single party managed to get a full majority, both the AAP and the BJP want to project themselves as the party that will get more than half the seats in the capital.
But that election, back in 2013, was also significant for another reason: no one came even close to predicting the final tally for the AAP. Opinion polls in the run-up to that election gave an average of 15 seats, although the party actually ended up getting 28. Most pollsters also predicted 24 seats for the Congress, which finished with one-third that number.
Now much of this was because pollsters tend to undercount the voices of the urban poor, often because those in the community are reluctant to openly state their choices. “Members of marginalised communities often misrepresent their views out of intimidation and fear of reprisal from the often urban interviewers. This is apparently the reason Mayawati’s electoral base is always under-represented in polls,” the Caravan reported, in a comprehensive piece on the art and science of opinion polls a couple of years ago.
But while the AAP was clearly underestimated and the Congress overestimated, it’s important to point out that the 2013 polls also got the final results wrong for the BJP. An average of the polls gave the saffron party 29 seats, when they would actually end up with 32.
In the Lok Sabha elections too, although the distortions were not as blatant, pollsters underestimated the strength of the BJP’s support base, particularly under Narendra Modi. Of the seven seats in Delhi, the opinion poll average predicted 6 seats for the BJP and 1 to the AAP, when in fact, the former ended up winning all seven quite comfortably.
So while the opinion polls might be a good indicator of sentiment, they are by no means an accurate predictor of what exactly will happen, especially when the margin in 10 seats in the capital was a matter of just 2000 votes. The AAP, having been on the receiving end of this for so long, would be smart not to suddenly now presume that the opinion polls are going to be an accurate indicator of the final results.
