The battle for the states is a mixed bag with Mamata Banerjee projected to win the high-stakes battle for West Bengal despite losing the war of perception, DMK-Congress is sweeping Tamil Nadu, the Left is comfortably retaining Kerala while the BJP is retaining Assam and the AINRC–BJP alliance in Puducherry is slated to be victorious, as per the IANS C Voter opinion poll wave 2.
An important observation in the tracker is a significant gap between the numbers of actual voting intention and the perception of winnability in West Bengal.
“While the BJP is leading the war of perception and winnability, it is the TMC which is still leading the likely voter’s equation”, it said.
The survey has a sample size of 70608 for 824 seats in 5 states with a margin of error of 3-5 percent.
In Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Assam, and Puducherry, there is no contradiction observed as far as the actual voting and perception of winning are concerned. In fact, in all these states, the perception of winning goes further up for the leading party in actual vote share, which confirms the trend reported by the Tracker.
The TMC led by West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is tipped to get a simple majority in the high decibel and cut-throat Bengal election with a projected seat share of 156 seats in an assembly of 294. TMC is holding on to its vote share with erosion of just 2.1 per cent. The challenger, BJP is making big gains with a vote share swing of 27.8 percent to notch 38 per cent vote share and will get 100 seats while the Left-Congress combine is projected to get 35 seats.
In Tamil Nadu, it is the DMK-led combine that is headed towards a nearly two-thirds majority with the alliance with the Congress and others projected to win 158 seats out of 234 while the ruling AIADMK in alliance with BJP and others will get only 62 seats. The UPA alliance is only gaining a 2 percent vote share but AIADMK is losing heavily with the erosion of 15 percent vote share.
In Kerala, the Left Democratic Front (LDF) is repeating its 2016 performance and will form the government again with a haul of 87 seats compared to 91 in the previous election. While the LDF is losing a 3.4 percent vote share, the Congress-led UDF is losing more with 6.2 percent erosion and even BJP is losing a vote share while others are gaining. The UDF is projected to win 51 seats in a house of 140.
In Assam, BJP Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal is headed for a second term with the party matching its 2016 performance and winning 72 seats, just down 2 seats in a house of 126. The Congress is winning 47 seats despite winning big in vote share by almost 10 percentage points reducing the gap with the BJP to just 2 percent but winning fewer seats.
In Puducherry, while the Congress government lost the vote in the assembly, it is also losing at the hustings. The AINRC-BJP-AIADMK alliance is winning big with 19 seats in a house of 30.
