Exit polls on Saturday evening projected that the Aam Aadmi Party would cross the halfway mark in the Delhi Assembly and form government on its own.
The exit polls gave the fledgling party between eight and 17 seats more than the 28 it won in its first election, the 2013 Assembly election. The party had then formed government with Congress support, but had quit the government after 49 days, a decision party founder and candidate Arvind Kejriwal apologised to voters for repeatedly during his campaign.
On Saturday evening, exit polls gave the AAP between 48 seats (Today’s Chanakya) and 39 (mid-point of C-Voter/ Times Now survey). Even the best case scenario for the BJP in the polls, which would be the upper limit of C-Voter’s margin of error, only gave it 33 seats, three short of a majority. The exit polls were commissioned by television channels, and their sample sizes and methodologies were not immediately available for scrutiny on Saturday evening.
The exit polls also gave the AAP between 12 and 15 percentage points more voteshare than in 2013; in the last election, the party was second to the BJP in voteshare, but in Saturday’s exit polls, it topped the BJP. The BJP’s projected voteshare is higher than what it was in the 2013 Assembly election, but lower than in the 2014 Lok Sabha election, in which it swept all seven parliamentary seats in Delhi.
In all exit polls, the Congress appeared to have been decimated. The best estimate gave it 4 seats, half of its 2013 tally. The party is projected to have lost over 10 percentage points from 2013 in its voteshare, and could do even worse than it did in the Lok Sabha elections, where it got just over 15 per cent of the vote. This will take the Congress’s performance in the city-state to a new low, beating the record it set itself in 2013.
“We are very happy, these results are encouraging. We wish that the final results are similar to those of the exit polls,” AAP leader Manish Sisodia told The Hindu . The BJP’s chief ministerial candidate Kiran Bedi who addressed a press conference on Saturday evening said that she took responsibility for the results, but disputed the exit polls that said that the AAP was most likely to win Delhi’s Assembly elections.
“The surveys I have seen so far are at 3 p.m. Between 3 and 6 p.m., large numbers of people who came in that time have not been accounted for. We should wait till February 10. I am confident that it will be positive for the BJP. I am confident that it will go in BJP’s favour,” she said.
(With inputs from Shubhomoy Sikdar and Sowmiya Ashok)
