BJP gains big but for NDA 272, it has to gain bigger

In fact, to cross the halfway mark and hit the magic figure of 272, it will have to get over 50 per cent of the 181 seats that go to polls on May 10.

With just 18 seats left in UP, the NDA will have to perform exceptionally well in areas which include Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. In the ’99 elections, the NDA got 82 from these 181 seats. To be able to come back to power, the alliance has to get 92 this time.

The exit poll for the third phase—83 constituencies which voted today—suggests the NDA may get 55, an increase of 14 and the Congress 15, a loss of five.

Out of the 30 seats in UP, the BJP is expected to win 14 (an improvement of five) while the Congress may get three, just one more than its present tally. The biggest loser, it seems, is the Samajwadi Party, which is set to lose five seats and win eight; the BSP is losing two seats to win in five.
In UP, the exit poll for the first phase suggested that the BJP was likely to lose some seats. Then the BJP concentrated all its big battalions from all across the country in UP and changed the focus of its campaign.

The exit poll suggests that the BJP and allies may get 20 out of the 25 seats in Rajasthan, leaving the Congress with just five. 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 Bihar, in the last phase of 12 seats, the BJP and allies are likely to get eight and the RJD and allies four. Laloo Yadav’s party and allies had the upper hand in the last two phases of voting, according to earlier exit polls. In Phase 4, the biggest phase, a massive 183 seats are up for grabs on May 10. The last phase also contains states such as Kerala, West Bengal, Delhi and Haryana where the scope for NDA’s gains is limited. The NDA will have to do exceptionally well in Tamil Nadu if it is to cross 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 went to the polls on Wednesday, May 5. Only Rajasthan saw polling for all 25 seats. For Bihar, this is the third and last round. 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 went to the polls today.

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 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.