The Evening Report of Phase 3 elections 2024

“Our vote is for tiffin”, “We are all voting for tiffin” were some of the war cries heard on the streets of Gulbarga. Even local Congress leaders and workers were campaigning to get all the votes for “tiffin”. The year was 1980 when the Congress high-command had nominated Chambakassery Mathai Stephen aka C.M. Stephen who was from Kerala and had no connect whatsoever from this backward district of north Karnataka. He never even went there to campaign. The local Congress leaders, finding it difficult to pronounce his name, had adopted the easier “tiffin” moniker for campaign purposes and the gullible masses followed suit. C.M. Stephen won the seat easily and went on to become a minister in the Indira cabinet. Such were the times of “the idea of India” democracy.

Geographies like Hyderabad-Karnataka, the Yadav belt in UP, the Malda-Murshidabad belt in West Bengal, the Desh parts of Maharashtra, these are all typical geographies that unwittingly and unknowingly powered the “idea of India” democracy for many decades. There were three common patterns visible in these geographies.

1. Fragmentation of Hindu votes, partly due to gullibility and partly due to myriad self-interests

2. A large enough segment of Hindu voters making common cause with Muslims

3. Powerful leaders like Mulayam, Pawar, Kharge etc. holding sway through the 3M route – Money, Muscle and Minorities.

This time around, fortunately or unfortunately, the election schedule was such that all these geographies went to polls on the same day in the third phase of 2024 elections. To that extent, this was the toughest phase of election for BJP, though what we wanted to test was how much have the ground realities changed in these geographies due to the emergence of USHV as a demographic phenomenon. To be sure, at the outset, this phase looks like it is overwhelmingly favouring the saffron party because of the oversized impact of Gujarat which is a foregone conclusion by all means. Yet, for us here at 5Forty3 datalabs, the real story of 2024 is to observe whether the Modi wave is intact after a decade and whether BJP+ is actually increasing vote-share or shedding votes.

As you already know, we 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.

But first let us do the round-up of three keenly watched constituencies of this phase, which we were micro-tracking.