Haryana assembly election results defy exit poll predictions

The C-Voter-India Today polls gave Congress 50-58 seats and the BJP 20-28 seats in Haryana, while the Republic Bharat-Matrize polls put the Congress tally at 55-62 as against the BJP’s 18-24. In J&K, the C-Voter-India Today survey put the NC-Congress combine at 40-48 seats and the BJP at 27-32 seats in the 90-member assembly.

The Axis My India exit poll had projected Congress to secure a majority with 53-65 seats in the 90-seat Haryana Assembly, while the BJP was expected to take just 18-28 seats, and the INLD-BSP alliance, 1-5 seats. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) was not expected to win any seats.

Talking to the Indian Express, Pradeep Gupta, Chairman & Managing Director of Axis My India, said, “We had predicted a 35% voteshare for BJP, which went up to 40%, and a 43% voteshare for Congress in Haryana, which turned out to be 40%. So, in terms of voteshare, there is just a difference of 3-5% between forecast and actual numbers.”

While Republic TV-Matrize had forecast 55-62 seats for Congress, with the BJP trailing at 18-24 seats. Dainik Bhaskar’s survey also predicted 44-54 seats for Congress, and 15-29 for BJP. In J&K, most predicted a hung assembly. However, contrary to forecasts, the results threw up a decisive win for the Congress-NC alliance.

Admitting that they got the final tally way off the mark, Gupta said it was a single-phase election and they had to do their survey and present the exit poll results within a day. “It was a short duration that we got to work in Haryana, which is something that happened in Eastern UP and Bengal at the time of Lok Sabha polls, which is possibly why our predictions were not so accurate,” he added.

Another pollster, who didn’t want to be identified put it on the rise of “dormant, quiet voter”, whose patterns remain unrecorded in most surveys, while it’s the vocal voter who becomes part of the same size. The predictions in Haryana could also have gone marginally wrong owing to the swing in Dalit votes in favour of BJP, and the division of Jat votes, he adds, which the pollsters couldn’t read so concisely.

Exit polls had also missed the mark in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, where many predicted the BJP-led NDA would win over 350 seats. However, the BJP ended up with 240 out of 543 seats, while Congress made significant gains, winning 99 seats.

At the time, most pollsters admitted to having got the state of Uttar Pradesh wrong, where Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party bagged 37 seats, and almost an equal number went to the BJP, even as it remained way below the exit poll projections of 60 seats for the saffron party.

Calling the exit polls a waste of time, NC leader Omar Abdullah, tipped to be J&K chief minister, said in a post on X, “If you pay for exit polls or waste time discussing them, you deserve all the jokes/memes/ridicule. There was a reason I called them a waste of time a few days ago.”