Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party is all set to sweep the upcoming Delhi Assembly elections, said the first opinion poll to be conducted ahead of the next month’s elections.
The poll was commissioned by ABP News and conducted by Centre for Voting Opinion & Trends in Election Research (C-Voter), and indicated hardly any loss of popularity from five years ago, when the party had won 67 out of 70 seats with a vote share of around 54%.
“As per ABP-CVoter’s initial survey, AAP takes the lead in vote shares with 53.3% (54-64 seats), followed by BJP with 25.9% (3-13 seats) in Delhi; while Congress is expected to open its count this time with 4.7% vote share winning around 0-6 seats.”
The prediction comes hours after a senior Congress Party leader claimed that the party will come back to power in the National Capital Region, and didn’t need to ally with Aam Aadmi Party.
According to the survey, Arvind Kejriwal remains the first choice as the chief minister of Delhi with a whopping 70% of the people preferring him as the CM.
“The survey also reveals that Kejriwal’s approval rating stands way higher than Dr. Harsh Vardhan (11%) of the BJP.”
32.7% of the respondents believe that the Kejriwal-led party is in a better position to solve the problems of the city. However, another 36% said they do not know who has the solution to their woes.
The results are unlikely to bring any comfort to BJP, the party which has been in power at the center for the last five years. It has been losing power in the states one by one, and has seen its footprint halved from around 65% of the country three years ago to about 33% now.
No political analyst has been able to pin point a single factor that is causing voter disillusionment with the BJP, though the poor economic condition as well as ‘anti-incumbency’ have been cited most often.
Surprisingly, even in the middle of its decline in the states, the BJP was re-elected with a strong majority to the center, indicating that the factors that ail the party are at the local levels.
It could also suggest that voters fail to see any other option at the center, but do so at the state level, where many regional non-Congress, non-BJP options exist.
On the other side, the results should bring some solace to Aam Aadmi Party headquarters in Delhi, as the party faced a wipe-out from India if it lost its support base in Delhi — the only place where it has succeeded in coming to power. AAP has repeatedly failed to replicate its success in Delhi in neighboring states like Punjab.
The results also indicate that voters like Kejriwal’s more ‘humble’ avatar. Midway into his tenure as the Delhi chief minister, Kejriwal was forced to make a drastic change to his combative public persona and style after a string of setbacks and negative feedback.
Kejriwal made a switch from conducting a relentless negative campaign against Narendra Modi to a more positive format that projected him less as a rival to Modi and more as an efficient CM for Delhi.
In all, the C-voter survey reached out to a total of approximately 13,076 people of Delhi.
The voting agency said current projections are based on CVoter daily tracking poll conducted during last seven days on rolling basis among 18+ adults statewide, including likely voters.
The data is weighted to the known demographic profile of the states. Final data has socio-economic profile within +/-1% of the demographic profile of the national capital.
“This provides the closest possible trends,” the polling agency said.
The Tracking Poll Fieldwork covers random probability samples during the last 7 days from the release date.
The sample spread is across all assembly segments in the poll bound states. The Margin of Error (MoE) is +/- 3% at macro level and +/- 5% at micro level with 95% confidence interval.