One of the unique features of Indian election is that trends are always expanding and rarely do they ever change. We Indians have this unique ability to collectively arrive at decisions and then homogenously execute that decision region after region. Unlike say the US, where verdicts keep altering from one state to another, we are more of a consciously uniform society in our political thinking barring a few states like a Tamil Nadu or a Kerala.
This trend of uniformity of electoral verdicts is especially true for multiple-phase elections as we have seen repeatedly in the past. The one exceptional election that did not follow the trend was in 1991 which suddenly became more pro-Congress in the latter phases after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination which had created a sympathy wave for him. Had Rajiv Gandhi not been assassinated, history would probably have recorded the first time that BJP would have won 150+ seats and maybe even attempted to form a government which eventually happened in the next election of 1996. Imagine the first BJP government coming to power in 1991 and authoring the inevitable economic reforms and how it would have changed the trajectory of India.
Thus, even in 2024, as we move from one phase to another, we must be cognizant of this “trend” factor of Indian elections. Our models, in fact, assign a certain weightage to the “trend” factor and take corrective measures, if the data becomes more noisy in latter phases, so that we can adhere to the central trend of an election cycle.
We here at 5Forty3 Datalabs are looking at this election through two dimensions to try and quantify the growth or degrowth of both the alliances – the NDA and the INDI – as compared to 2019. The first dimension is what we call the “core heartland” and the second dimension is the “Periphery” consisting of the east and the south. Needless to say, the core heartland is the NDA stronghold whereas the periphery is more of a fragmented zone split between the INDI alliance and other parties like the TMC in West Bengal, the YSRCP in Andhra Pradesh, the BJD in Odisha, the Communists in Kerala, the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu and other smaller parties in the North East.
Essentially, our trackers are trying to model two different sets of elections; the core election and the peripheral election; which will then be used to do a comparative analysis using the 2019 metrics of these underlying geographies through each passing phase. This is our big macro innovation for 2024, the core v/s periphery predictive analysis at the macro level which will give us the clearest possible trend.
So what transpired today, in the second phase of election on 26th of April, 2024? Let us take a high level look for now.