For Delhi BJP, a silver lining: Fewer seats but larger vote share as compared to 2017

However, even though BJP’s tally has gone down to 104 out of 250 wards from 2017’s 181 out of 272 wards, its vote share has seen an uptick from 36% in 2017 to 39% this year.

The total number of seats have reduced from 272 to 250 on account of three civic bodies – South, North and East – being unified into a single MCD.

The Congress’s vote share, meanwhile, slid from 21% to 12%, indicating that both the AAP and BJP have swung sections of the Congress’s vote share in their favour.

While voters think and vote differently in assembly polls and municipal polls, and results rarely follow the same patterns, it is interesting to note that the AAP’s vote share in the 2022 municipal polls is significantly less than its vote share in the 2020 state assembly polls, which stood at 54%. On the other hand, the BJP’s vote share in the municipal polls is roughly the same as its performance in the 2020 assembly polls, when it had a 41% vote share.

Among the three major parties, the Congress is the only one which has a better vote share in the municipal polls than both the 2020 and 2015 assembly polls (12% and 10% respectively).

What this could reflect is that some voters who are opting for other parties in the Delhi assembly – from which the Congress was completely wiped out with zero seats in the 2020 election – are continuing to vote for their local Congress candidates in the municipal elections.

The patterns are also vastly different from the 2019 Lok Sabha polls where, just one year before sweeping the Delhi assembly polls, the AAP had come in third with just 18.2% of the vote share, behind Congress, which had a 23% vote share. The BJP’s dominance in that election was overwhelming, with a 57% vote share in Delhi.