2nd last lap: NDA surges ahead but still short of 272

Based on this the latest national projection gives Congress and its allies 180-200 and others get 95-115 seats.

The second phase of polls in UP on May 5 throws up an interesting scenario. Out of the 30 seats, the BJP is expected to win 13 (an improvement of five) while the Congress may maintain its two seats.

The Samajwadi Party, widely expected to be the crucial player in case of a hung House, is slipping with a loss of four seats and getting nine. The BSP is likely to win six, a loss of one seat.

In UP, the first phase exit polls suggested that the BJP was likely to lose some seats. Since then, the BJP has concentrated all its big battalions from all across the country in UP.

There has also seems to be a change in the campaign strategy of the BJP—away from the stress on ‘Shining India’ and more towards emphasising ‘Stable India’. The effort may have paid off as the BJP is holding on to its vote share in the second phase of voting in UP, while there may be some erosion in the vote of the Samajwadi party. In this phase in UP, a fair number of seats are held with very small margins and this is where all parties will be concentrating their efforts to win more seats.

The opinion poll suggests that the BJP and allies may get 21 of the 25 seats in Rajasthan, leaving the Congress with just four. In the 12 seats that will go to polls in Madhya Pradesh on May 5, the BJP is projected to get 11 and the Congress just one.

In Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, the BJP is coming off a spectacular win in the Vidhan Sabha elections. In 1999, the BJP already held a large proportion of the seats in these states, so the gains that it makes in these states are likely to be limited.

In Bihar, in the last phase of 12 seats, the BJP and allies are likely to hold their own with eight and the RJD and allies three. This wraps up polling in Bihar where Laloo has an upper hand overall.

Phase III is a small phase with just 83 seats going to the polls on May 5. In Phase IV, the biggest phase, a massive 183 seats are up for grabs on May 10.

Unfortunately for the NDA, that last phase also contains some states such as Kerala, West Bengal, Delhi and Haryana where the scope for gains is limited. The NDA will have to do exceptionally well in Tamil Nadu if it is to get past the halfway mark.

METHODOLOGY: The Indian Express and New Delhi Television (NDTV) have jointly commissioned A C Nielsen, a leading market research agency, to conduct fieldwork for a series of opinion and exit polls to gauge the voting intentions of the electorate. Four large states are going to the polls on Wednesday, May 5. Of these four, in only one state, namely Rajasthan, are all 25 seats going to the polls in this round. For Bihar, this is the third round and, at the end of this round, when voting is held in 12 seats, all 40 seats will have gone to the polls. For UP, it is the second of the three rounds covering 30 seats, leaving 18 seats for the last round on May 10. For Madhya Pradesh, this is the first of two rounds, where 12 out of 29 constituencies go to the polls.

The national projection in this article is based on a three-fold aggregation. For the seats that have already voted, the projection is based on the exit polls. For the Phase 3 seats, the projection is derived from the opinion poll conducted between April 16 and April 27. For all the seats that will go to the polls in the last phase on May 10, the projection is based on the opinion poll completed in mid-March. But some words of caution. All polls—opinion and exit—are subject to margins of error. The sampling error in this poll differs across the different states, with the highest range of error not exceeding 3 per cent.