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With counting underway and early trends now cementing into solid leads, one key takeaway from the Lok Sabha 2024 results is just how wrong the exit poll predictions turned out to be. At the time of publishing , the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) was leading in 294 seats and the I.N.D.I.A bloc was ahead in 231 seats, numbers that are a lot closer than exit polls had indicated.
The 2024 elections are a tight fight – not just in the number of seats but also the vote share, with the NDA alliance securing 45 percent of the vote share compared to the I.N.D.I.A bloc’s 43 percent, a difference of just two percent. Compare that to 2019, when the NDA had 47 percent of the vote compared to just 35 percent combined vote share of the parties that now make up the I.N.D.I.A bloc.
And even though the BJP is the single largest party, it’s fairly certain now that the party by itself will not cross the halfway mark, and will need to rely on the alliance to get it over 272 seats. The significance of this lies in the fact that till a few months ago, the Telugu Desam Party and the Janata Dal (United) were not even part of the NDA, and now, the BJP’s fate lies in its reliance on these parties.
This is quite a different scenario from that projected by the exit polls – which not only predicted a clear majority for the BJP, but also close to 400 seats for the NDA alliance.
(Source: India Today)
The numbers above indicate that pollsters overestimated the NDA’s numbers while grossly underestimating the I.N.D.I.A bloc’s performance. Today’s Chanakya poll – quite accurate in its bullish predictions for the BJP and NDA in 2014 and 2019 – projected up to 415 seats for NDA and as low as 96 seats for the I.N.D.I.A bloc.
The markets reflect the tumultuous shift – tumbling today after having rallied on the optimism of the exit polls on Monday. The Adani Group of companies were the biggest losers, with the ports unit down by 25 percent.
While many had hailed the exit polls as gospel predictions of what was to come, I.N.D.I.A bloc leaders had urged caution. Congress leader from Karnataka D. K. Shivakumar had said on Sunday that the exit polls have gotten it wrong, just as they did in the Karnataka Assembly elections last year.
"Exit polls had predicted that the Congress party would not come to power during the last Assembly elections, but they were wrong. Exit polls had given only about 80-85 seats to Congress, but I had predicted we would win 136 seats as per the survey we had conducted. We eventually won 136 seats," Shivakumar said.
“We are very hopeful that our results will be completely opposite of what exit polls are showing,” Sonia Gandhi said on Monday.
And even though ‘complete opposite’ might be a bit of a stretch, there is no denying the fact that the exit polls got it all very wrong.
