Every election, there is no dearth of pollsters and their predictions. How much of the forecast comes true?
Date : 18/05/2024
The results for the Bihar Assembly elections are expected on November 10. Two major alliances are in the poll fray, the NDA (the JD(U) and BJP) and Mahagathbandhan (the RJD, INC and Communists). The Lok Janshakti Party (LJP), an NDA partner in the Central government, is pitting itself solely against JD(U) candidates. The predictions based on exit polls will start streaming in from the evening of November 7, coinciding with the closing of the final phase of the elections. In this article we will see how accurate the exit poll predictions are with the 2015 elections as an example.
The 2015 election offers an interesting contrast to 2020 with the JD(U), RJD and INC forming the Mahagathbandhan against the NDA (the BJP and LJP) in a two cornered contest.
Some context to the alliance pattern: In the 2010 election, the JD(U) and BJP were in alliance against the RJD and INC. However, in the run up to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections the JD(U) came out of NDA and faced the elections alone against NDA (the BJP and LJP) and the UPA (the RJD and INC). However, the ruling JD(U) was swept away by the Modi wave and could just manage to win 2 seats out of the 40 it contested. The UPA managed to get six seats with the NDA winning the rest of the constituencies.
So for the 2015 Assembly elections, to take on the NDA, a Mahagathbandhan was formed with the JD(U), RJD and INC. While the Mahagathbandhan projected Nitish Kumar as the chief ministerial (CM) candidate, the NDA did not project any CM candidate. It banked on the popularity of Narendra Modi at the Centre.
The projections by various media channels based on the exit polls for the 2015 Assembly elections are presented in Table 1.
Table 1: Exit poll predictions vs final results of the 2015 Bihar elections
NOTA – 3%
Only News 24–Today’s Chanakya projected a thumping win for the NDA. C Voter and News Nation both projected a simple majority in favor of the Mahagathbandhan. CNN-IBN-Axis predicted exactly the opposite to the prediction of Today’s Chanakya indicating a clear majority to Mahagathbandhan. Its prediction of the total number of seats was also closest to the results.
Predicting the number of seats is definitely a challenge. But the forecasters could not even predict the vote share correctly. CNN-IBN got the NDA’s vote share right but it was way off the mark on Mahagathbandhan. But, it predicted the number of seats for Mahaghatbhandhan correctly, maybe that’s a serendipity. C Voter predicted the vote share of Mahagathbandhan correctly but fared poorly with predicting seats. Except CNN-IBN, everybody failed to predict the vote share of NDA correctly. What comes out clearly is that there is no pattern in the prediction of even vote share, leave alone the number of seats. Besides, there is no strong relationship between the vote share and number seats won also.
Some inferences we can gain from the Table are that other parties have gained a vote share of about 21% for seven constituencies. Although the different pollsters had predicted around 3 to 14 seats for others, none of them were able to predict their vote share. Actually, the other parties, with 21% of votes had played a very crucial role in reducing the vote difference between the two major alliances. Their vote-share-to-seats ratio is low but still they played a crucial part in vote cutting for the alliances. Since two major alliances are in the fray, it is naturally difficult for pollsters to identify the people who are not backing them. Further, the NOTA option is not observed in any of the exit polls although it accounted for about 3% of the popular votes.
Even the two exit polls which gave a simple majority to Mahagathbandhan, was close to predicting their vote share right but erred in predicting the NDA’s. There is a possibility that the NDA’s vote share was reduced by the other parties. Though they did not convert it into corresponding seats, they did spoil the party. So, even if the difference in vote share is less and if the other parties are able to gain a considerable vote share, it can possibly skew the results towards one side. The pollsters should also consider NOTA as an option in their opinion polls. The exit polls will be out on November 7 and the final results on 10th. Let’s wait for the interesting matches and mismatches.
Even on the day of counting pollsters rush to declare the winners very early on. Most of the time, they get it wrong. Could it be because of biases clouding one’s judgments and projections?
Meanwhile, it would be prudent to look at exit polls like another weather report of those days and wait for the last vote to be counted. We are all seeing what’s happening in the US Presidential Elections. It is high time political leaders and psephologists concede to the voters and wait for their verdict humbly.
References
https://infoelections.com/infoelection/bihar-news/6795-bihar-exit-poll-2015.html
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