Calling the 2024 elections after 4 phases

“This is the first election of 21^st century… slowly, in 20-25 years – maybe not in the next 5-10 years – roadshows, yatras, public meetings and other traditional forms of campaigning will all be done on the electronic media. How you present yourself on television, how you look, how you dress, how you talk will be the main thing.” Pramod Mahajan had explained right before the 2004 elections. BJP reportedly spent a whopping 65 Crore rupees for its media blitzkrieg in the 2004 campaign.

It turned out to be one of the biggest failed campaigns in the history of electoral politics. Mahajan’s entire assumption of “electronic media” replacing all traditional forms of campaigning was so deeply flawed that it has been virtually ridiculed by history. At that point of time when Mahajan made his blunder, the only form of electronic media that existed was satellite television; social media was yet to be born and internet was simply an urban geek network with under 5% penetration across India. Two decades later, the sheer expansion of the media-tech universe that we have seen today was virtually unimaginable back then – 80% of India uses smart phones and cheap data packages have penetrated across the entire rural landscape of India.

Yet, traditional campaigning has not disappeared at all. If anything, Narendra Modi has emerged as the greatest campaigner ever in India. His roadshows, public meetings, yatras and on the ground activities are the mainstay of BJP’s meteoric rise over the last ten years. Party spokespersons on TV channels, social media influencers etc are merely an addendum to the actual ground campaign of the party. For instance, one of the biggest reasons for BJP defeating the mighty combo of SP-BSP in 2019 was the way the party approached the labharthis of the state. In every polling booth, BJP workers were given a special voter list containing the names of people who had benefitted from either the central or state government schemes within their booth area and these workers went and directly sought support from these voters.

This is, in fact, the core Hedgewar philosophy which became the founding principle of the RSS – to build physical networks of Swayamsevaks by working on the ground. The Mahajan innovation of 2004 was merely an aberration, BJP and the Sangh went back to their natural state of existence with the rise of Modi. This is why when people make these lofty assumptions about the 2024 elections having the same vibes as the 2004 cycle, we must make the clear distinction. There are four broad areas in how these two election cycles are completely different, let us analyse each of them.

Unlike the 2004 top-heavy approach of the BJP focussed too much on messaging rather than working on the ground, this time around BJP is the only party that is working tirelessly on the ground in most parts of India – examples abound from Kerala, Andhra and Telangana to Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh where party workers are highly organized at the polling booth level and constituency level. In fact, we have observed everywhere that it is the opposition and Congress workers who are mostly missing from action leading to lower turnouts in their erstwhile strongholds – have personally heard at least on 3 occasions from poor Muslim voters complaining that there is nobody to “take them to polling booths, while earlier everything used to be organised days in advance”.

Prime Minister Modi’s popularity is still at its highest watermark and his campaign is pitch perfect, rising at the right time and peaking at the best time, unlike the Vajpayee campaign of 2004 which hardly ever took off due to his ill health. Everywhere you go on the ground you hear the same rhetoric – “after Modi’s rally here, opposition workers have gone silent and voters have shifted to lotus” – we have heard some version of this statement in dozens of constituencies in different geographies from ordinary people. Not once have we encountered a similar rhetoric for any opposition leader, including Rahul Gandhi. Today nobody in India has the unlimited capacity to alter the local narrative like Modi by just conducting a rally or a roadshow.

Unlike 2004 when there was a lot of drought related distress in rural India and general disenchantment in urban India, Modi and his governance models are immensely popular even today. Broadly five positives get mentioned everywhere; Ram Mandir, the DBT that gets into their accounts with zero corruption, free ration, infrastructure and better law and order (especially in states like UP, MP and Bihar). Conversely, by mid-March 2004, the opposition campaign had picked up steam while BJP’s was faltering badly, whereas today we haven’t seen any such signs on the ground except for rare states like Karnataka. What about unemployment and price rise? These issues are perennial and Indian voters have long stopped choosing governments based on these issues as they simply cannot make much of a distinction from one party or the other – this is technically a mass behavioural pattern wherein the masses consciously or subconsciously equate all political parties as equally competent or incompetent in handling these issues and consequently this fails to become an electoral issue and rather transforms into a societal structural issue.

The sheer margins that BJP is getting in its stronghold regions that have polled so far is a very strong signal of why 2024 is different from 2004. In 2004, the data was very clear, even in those seats that BJP was winning, the margins were touch and go at best. Today, data is very clear, say from Uttar Pradesh or Gujarat where the party is actually improving from its highest peak of 2019 which would not have happened had there been a 2004 like disenchantment with the BJP.

The business end of the elections are over. 379 parliamentary constituencies have already voted. 19 states have fully completed their voting process. India has, for all practical purposes decided the trajectory of 2024, it is now only about adding to the margins and collecting the bits and pieces. Our servers now have enough data to make the clearest projections for this elections. We ran thousands of simulations using our predictive algorithms to arrive at our final projections for 2024 and here is what we think is going to happen, with a fair degree of certainty.