New Delhi: The latest opinion poll on Delhi elections shows a decisive lead for the Aam Aadmi Party, even as the campaigning heats up for elections to the 70-member assembly in the National Capital with just three days left of the ballot.
The poll, conducted done by ABP News-Nielsen shows AAP with a 50 percent vote share, followed by BJP with 41 percent and the Congress Party with 9%.
In the last assembly elections in Delhi, a 33.1 percent vote share translated into 31 seats for the BJP, while the AAP had 29.5 percent vote share (28 seats) and Congress garnered 24.5% share (8 seats).
Any party getting a 50% vote share in Delhi will come to power with a simple majority.
The ABP News-Nielsen polls also showed the Kejriwal is the most popular choice to be Delhi’s next chief minister. The survey shows him garnering 51 percent of votes, followed by Kiran Bedi with 40 percent and Congress Party’s Ajay Maken with eight percent. Three-fourth of the Muslim respondents think that Kejriwal is the most suitable CM of Delhi.
Similarly, a survey conducted by Economic Times shows that AAP will get 36-40 seats in the 70-member assembly with a vote share of 49% while BJP will win 28-32 seats, says the survey conducted in the last week of January. Delhi goes to polls on February 7, and results of the keenly watched contest will be declared three days later.
The findings of the poll of 3,260 respondents in 16 assembly constituencies are in sharp contrast to an earlier ET-TNS poll conducted in November-December last year that had shown BJP comfortably romping home with 43-47 seats. AAP was forecast to win 22-25 seats then, while Congress was expected to eke out anywhere between zero and three seats. Congress is now forecast to win 2-4 seats.
The period between the two opinion polls saw the Ghar Wapsi issue snowball into a major political controversy, the Uber taxi rape case and more recently the visit of US President Barack Obama.
The intervening period also saw Kiran Bedi being named as BJP’s chief ministerial candidate, apparently to counter AAP leader Kejriwal’s anti-corruption credentials and give voters a fresh face that could also deflect criticism that the party did not have a credible CM candidate in the Capital.
Meanwhile, Hindustan Times survey, conducted between January 27 and February 1, projects 36-41 seats for the Arvind Kejriwal-led party, and 27-32 seats for the BJP, with the Congress seen sliding to between 2 and 7 seats. The AAP is also ahead of the BJP by three percentage points in terms of vote share. Pollsters interviewed a total 3,578 voters across Delhi, roughly half of them women.
Santosh Desai, a social commentator, says the momentum has shifted towards AAP in the past few days but it still is a close contest. “Kiran Bedi in her interactions comes across as inflexible, as someone who is reading out from a fixed script or trying hard to push her way. Her nomination as the party’s CM candidate may have crystallized the assumption that BJP’s plans for Delhi are shaky,” he said.
