As voting concludes, performance in rural and urban seats shows the extent of a party’s regional influence in Gujarat. In 2017, the BJP acquired close to 60% of the urban votes. This year, the AAP fielded a candidate in nearly every seat challenging the BJP’s ability to maintain its urban voting base. However, the BJP’s vote share in urban areas has increased by 4.4% points, from 2017. Due to this, in 2022, the BJP continued to lead/win in a significant number of urban seats like it did in 2017.
Table 1 shows a party’s vote share across urban-rural seats. The BJP secured 64% votes in urban areas, an increase of 4.4% points from 2017. The INC secured 22.2% votes in urban areas, a decrease of 12.8% points from 2017. Surprisingly, AAP’s vote share was higher among rural seats than urban seats. The AAP got 14.6% of the rural votes, and 10.7% of the semi-rural votes. Their urban vote share, however, was just 9.7%.
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Table 2 lays out the number of seats that each party won/led in the urban and rural areas. The numbers now show that the BJP led/won 20 seats in urban areas, fairly similar to the 2017 election outcome. In the five seats AAP led/won, four were from rural areas and one was from a semi-rural area. The results clearly show that AAP was stronger in rural than urban areas.
