As TVK heads towards power in Tamil Nadu, the numbers behind the Vijay moment
The actor-politician's party managed to turn the bipolar politics into a triangular contest and came out on top, ending the dominance of DMK, AIADMK
In the 234-member Tamil Nadu Assembly, Vijay's TVK won 108 seats in its debut election. As actor-politician Vijay and his Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) gets the numbers together to form the government in Tamil Nadu after receiving support from the Congress and smaller parties such as the VCK, the CPI, and the CPI(M), an analysis of the results shows that the debutant party was not only able to carve a space for itself by ousting the Dravidian major in 91 seats, but also played the role of spoilsport in 51 seats by securing more votes than the winner’s margin. Vijay is set to form the first non-DMK and non-AIADMK government in Tamil Nadu since 1967.
The TVK’s performance, winning 108 of the total 234 seats, is among the most successful debuts in Tamil Nadu, bettered only by the then actor-politician M G Ramachandran-led AIADMK in 1977, when it won 130 seats after breaking away from the DMK. However, the TVK’s vote share of 34.9% this year is considerably higher than the AIADMK’s 30.4%, which saw the state’s earliest three-cornered contest along with the Congress five decades ago.
Breaking down the numbers
In converting Vijay’s popularity into votes, the TVK cornered more than a third of the state-wide vote share, reducing the DMK to 24.2% (its fourth-lowest vote share in party history) and the AIADMK to 21.21% (its lowest vote share ever).
Though just 11 of the TVK’s 108 seats were won with more than 50% of the vote share, it won its seats by an average margin of 22,631 votes, well above the state-wide average winning margin of 16,784, and just shy of the average margin set in the 2021 polls at 23,946 votes.
Notably, 23 of the TVK’s wins came in seats where the DMK had won at least 50% of the vote share in 2021, and another 3 seats where the AIADMK had secured more than half the vote.
In a further indication of the TVK’s impact, the number of seats where the winner secured less than 40% of the vote share has grown from just 13 in 2021 to 150 this year. Of these 150 seats, there were 49 TVK candidates who won after winning less than 40% of the vote share, followed by the DMK at 48, and the AIADMK at 35.
But among these 150 seats are 39 where the vote-share gap between the winner and the third-place finisher was less than 5 percentage points, making them among the closest triangular contests in this election. In Palani, for instance, the AIADMK won by securing 32.1% of the vote share, with the TVK in second at 31.8% and the CPI(M) in third at 31.4%, which means just 0.7-percentage points separated the candidates and that just a slight change in voter preferences could have led to a different outcome. Of the 39 such seats, the TVK won 12 while the DMK and AIADMK each won 11.
DMK in two-way fights
There were another 49 seats that saw bipolar contests — where the winner and runner-up were within 5-percentage points of the vote share of each other, and the third-place finisher was more than 5-percentage points behind the runner-up.
The DMK was the most successful in bipolar contests, winning 21 such seats, followed by the TVK at 17 and the AIADMK far behind at 6. While 24 of these bipolar fights were between the DMK and TVK, 7 were between the AIADMK and TVK, and 9 were between the traditional rivals DMK and AIADMK.
However, the most telling indicator of the TVK’s win is the number of seats where the winning candidate was ahead of the runner-up in vote share terms by at least 10-percentage points. Of the total 66 such seats, the TVK won 47, with the AIADMK and DMK far behind at 11 and 6, respectively. While AIADMK chief Edappadi K. Palaniswami won his Edappadi seat with 57.7% of the vote share, more than 38 percentage points ahead of the runner-up for the biggest such gap in this election, the TVK managed to win 14 seats with a vote-share gap of at least 20 percentage points, the highest among all the parties.
Besides emerging as the single-largest party, the TVK also cut into its rivals’ vote shares in 51 seats. Though the TVK finished in third place in all these seats, it secured more votes than the winning margin. It cost the DMK in 23 such seats and the AIADMK in 19 such seats.
Across Tamil Nadu, 163 seats changed hands between parties this time compared to the 2021 elections. The TVK wrested 26 seats from the AIADMK, accounting for 39% of all the seats AIADMK won in 2021, and another 65 seats from the DMK, accounting for 49% of all seats won by the DMK in 2021. The TVK also bagged 11 seats won by the Congress in 2021. In contrast, the DMK retained just 40 of the 133 seats won in 2021 and wrested 15 seats from the AIADMK, which in turn retained 22 of its 66 seats from 2021 and flipped 22 from the DMK.
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