Thursday, March 21, 2019

Who Will Win India 2019?



A national election in the world's largest democracy is quite an event. It goes on for weeks for one. The campaign itself lasts only a few weeks. It is not a year-long lurch like in the US. But then, at some level, the campaign is never over. There is always a major election right around the corner somewhere in India. Only a few months back the Congress elbowed the BJP out of power in three major states. But then the Pakistan-India ruckus happened, and that was advantage BJP, politically speaking.

Polls are notoriously off in India. Poll numbers have missed the mark consistently over the last several elections. It might be because the majority of Indian voters are out of reach for pollsters. In the 2014 election, the BJP performed much better than any poll had forecast. It ended up with a comfortable majority. It was a replay of the Rajiv Gandhi victory for Congress in 1984.

What will happen this time? It is hard to tell. Has Modi delivered? Yes and no. The land reform and the labor market reform that might have upped job creation were both opposed and successfully, despite Modi throwing his weight behind them. Major work has been done on the infrastructure front. India has climbed up in the ease of doing business index. The jump is huge. Through his relentless travels, Modi has put India on the global map.

But then Atal Bihari Vajpayee lost in 2004. It looked like he might win.

Right now looks like the BJP led alliance, the NDA, will win, and Modi will come back as Prime Minister. But should that not happen do not expect Rahul Gandhi to become Prime Minister. The non-Congress, non-BJP parties will want someone like Mamata Banerjee or Chandrababu Naidu to take the lead. But Modi is still the most popular politician in India by a wide margin. He does not seem to have competition.


NDA to win majority with 283 seats in 2019 Lok Sabha Polls: Times Now-VMR survey
The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance is likely to come to power with a majority on its own, an opinion poll by Times Now-VMR completed after the Balakot air strikes has predicted. The survey predicted the NDA to get as much as 282 seats - 10 over the halfway mark - leaving the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance ( UPA) way behind with 136 seats. Other parties which include the SP-BSP-RLD and non aligned parties like the BJD, Telangana Rashtriya party and YSR Congress could end up with 136. The predicted tally for the NDA is 54 seats less than what it got in 2014.























Math Over Popularity In UP, Edge For Gathbandhan: Prannoy Roy's Analysis
the Mayawati-Akhilesh Yadav combo alone could bring down the NDA score in the state from 73 to 37, even if Prime Minister Narendra Modi's popularity is at the level of the 2014 national election....... The addition of Congress to the mix could have deducted another 14 seats from the NDA tally, reducing it to 23 seats, data shows.
Lok Sabha polls: Modi-BJP show all the way, no chance for Rahul Gandhi as PM, predicts satta bazaar
The satta bazaar predicts 55 seats for the BJP in Uttar Pradesh
The Man Who Predicted 2014 Indian Election Reveals Who Will Take The Throne In 2019
The last election was not about the party but the leader. Similarly, the 2019 election will also be about the leader. The seasoned people are talking about party politics while the youth is focused on the leader ..... the world will be ruled by four nationalist Narendra Modi, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Benjamin Netanyahu. ....... I am picking data from rural India. How many families have benefited from the cooking gas and electricity? How many have got access to toilets and how many kids are going to school now? When I study this I am getting a figure of fifty crore. Even in forty-fifty crore, being a conservative I divide it by two, it is twenty crore. You know in 2014, the elections were won by a small margin of 1.4 crore and here you have a larger swing. So my calculation says 2019 belongs to Modi.
Why India's Pollsters Will Have A Tough Time Predicting Election 2019 In the last three elections, opinion polls have been significantly off the mark.
in the last three elections, polls have been significantly off the mark. In 2004 and 2009 the victorious Congress alliance was completely underestimated, while in 2014 only Bajaj’s firm predicted the BJP would win an outright majority. ..... if two regional parties already in alliance joined forces with the main opposition Congress, the BJP would be wiped out in the state, almost certainly losing power nationally.
BJP will lose seats but win 2019 Lok Sabha polls, says survey August 21, 2018
According to the India Today’s Mood of the Nation (MOTN) July 2018 poll, the NDA will be back in power with 281 seats, nine seats ahead of the half-way mark in the 543-member Lok Sabha. However, but the BJP will lose its majority and slide down to 245 seats. The UPA will be far behind with 122 seats and the Congress will increase its tally to 83 seats. ..... The BJP, according to the poll, will come down from the 282 seats it had won in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections but will increase its vote share from 31.34 per cent to 36 per cent. ..... The Congress, on the other hand, will increase its seat tally from the 44 it won in 2014 to 83 seats, while its vote share will go up from 19.52 to 31 per cent...... The ‘Others’, who are basically fence-sitters, are predicted to get a whopping 140 seats with a 33 per cent of the vote share in the Lok Sabha. ...... Prime Minister Narendra Modi continues to be the favourite for the top job with 49 per cent of the respondents rooting for him while 27 per cent of the respondents favoured Congress President Rahul Gandhi for the post.
Prashant Kishor's PM Prediction for 2019 Polls Will Have BJP Cheering
Prashant Kishor said on Monday that Narendra Modi would return as the Prime Minister after Lok Sabha polls ..... A resident of Buxar district in the state, Kishor shot to fame in 2014 when he managed the poll campaign for Narendra Modi, then the prime ministerial candidate of the BJP, which went on to put up its best-ever electoral performance....... A year later, he collaborated with Kumar who returned to power for his third consecutive term after registering a handsome victory in the assembly polls...... Among NDA constituents, the JD(U) is the third largest after the BJP and the Shiv Sena.
2019 Elections in India: Modi Won't Have It Easy January 3, 2019
Contrary to the traditional political punditry that the 2019 elections would be a ritual to re-elect the incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the miraculous return of the opposition Indian National Congress (INC) under Rahul Gandhi in state elections has thrown a major spanner in Modi’s works. ...... The INC has thrashed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the Hindi heartland states of Madhya Pradesh (114 of 230 seats), Rajasthan (99 of the 200 seats) and Chhattisgarh (68 of the 90 seats), which account for 65 seats in the Lok Sabha (Lower House of India’s bicameral parliament). In the 2014 general elections, the BJP had won 62 of these 65 seats. ........ When the BJP swept to power in 2014, winning 282 of the 543 seats, it became the first political party in thirty years to win an outright majority in India. ...... The regional and sub-national parties will the x-factor in India’s 2019 election. They would be the kingmakers who will be critical in determining who forms the next government.
Inside India's Colossal, Colorful, Tough-to-Predict Election
India’s elections have been notoriously difficult to predict because of the endless possibilities of coalitions. ...... In 2014, the Election Commission of India deployed 3.7 million polling staff, 550,000 security personnel, 56 helicopters and 570 special trains to conduct a five-week-long exercise in close to a million polling stations. ...... The commission sets up a polling booth for a lone voter in the Gir forest in western state of Gujarat, where lions roam. It also protected a polling station in Chhattisgarh by deploying a medical team to prevent a swarm of honeybees attacking voters....... now 430 million Indians own a smartphone, half a billion use the Internet, 300 million use Facebook, 200 million send messages on WhatsApp and 30 million are on Twitter. It means political parties and candidates will aggressively use new technology and social media to win the hearts and minds of young voters.
Why opinion poll predictions are drifting away from reality
View: Nobody knows anything about India's huge elections
The last elections, in 2014, threw up a result that had been unthinkable for three decades: a clear majority for one party, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. While repeating that mandate isn’t impossible, it will be extremely difficult. The BJP doesn’t have much of a presence outside the north and west of India and, for its majority in 2014, it had to win almost all the seats in which it was competitive. In the end, Modi himself only won a little more than 30 per cent of the vote. ...... This time around, Modi faces a more difficult task. Memories of the Congress years have faded. And his own performance as prime minister has been, at best, underwhelming. Government officials may claim that India is growing faster now than it ever has, but few people believe that. What everyone knows is that jobs are hard to come by and that farmers in particular are suffering. ....... He has never stopped campaigning. In 2014, he was an exciting novelty; in 2019 he is an institution. His face is everywhere, on walls and in newspapers, above reminders of one government welfare program or another. He has a radio show, his government can count on support from tame television channels and, of course, he still has Twitter. ..... voters aren’t pleased with the state of the economy or with the BJP’s administrative skills. ..... Few outside Modi’s own circle believed that he would win a majority in 2014. In 1999, the BJP won fewer seats -- after a border skirmish with Pakistan -- than predicted. In 2004, the BJP government was unexpectedly voted out. And, in 2009, the Congress increase in seat strength startled pretty much every observer. ..... Nobody ever knows quite what the Indian electorate will produce on counting day.
Will BJP win Lok Sabha polls 2019? Here's what top pollsters predict

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