This suggests that the BJP can still hope for a miracle in the last hour. Polling is on 7 February, and campaigning ends on 5 February.
Results are due on 10 February, but exit polls will tell us which way the wind is blowing on 7 February itself.
The only thing pollsters agree on is that the Congress is a goner. The highest number it is given by any of the polls is eight seats – the same as in December 2013 - while the lowest is a range of 0-3ut when it comes to the title bout, between the BJP and AAP, the results swing from a sweep for AAP to a BJP win.
In short, the pollsters themselves are tied into a draw on their verdict. Amit Shah can still hope he can pull off a last-minute surprise.
Firstpost looked at the seat projections and vote shares projected by six major pollsters, and two by relatively new poll data miners, and the result we get is three projected wins for AAP, four for BJP, and one tie (HT-Cfore, which gives both 31-36 seats).
Of the eight pollsters, six are fairly well known, while two others are relatively unknown. They are Nielsen (which did a survey for ABP News), IMRB (The Week), Cfore (Hindustan Times), TNS (Economic Times), Cicero (India Today), CVoter, 5Forty3, and an relatively unknown data analytics firm called Data Mineria.
The outlier poll, which gave AAP a huge win in the range of 38-46 seats, is Cicero, followed by TNS (36-40), and Nielsen (35). HT-Cfore, as we noted before, gave both parties seats in the range of 31-36 seats. In other words, either of them could win or ensure a draw.
The pollsters who give the BJP a win are 5Forty3, which gives the BJP a clean 40 seats (but nowhere near Amit Shah’s targeted two-thirds majority) and is clearly the outlier, followed by CVoter (37), and IMRB and Data Mineria (both 36). Thirty-five is the half-way mark, and 36 is the number needed by a party to be in a majority in the 70-member Delhi assembly.
What almost all pollsters show is a slippage for BJP between December and end-January. This is why one can say that the momentum is slipping away from BJP, from which AAP could be benefiting.
What cannot be said for sure is whether Amit Shah and Narendra Modi, with their high-pressure campaigning over the last one week, and the last-minute efforts of the Sangh Parivar activists, have managed to arrest the AAP’s acceleration to enable the BJP to remain at least as the largest single party, if not the winner.
This, unfortunately, we may not know till 7 February, when the exit polls may give us a better picture. So, for both AAP and BJP, it has to be fingers-crossed. But even exit polls can sometimes get it wrong.
At the end of the day, it would appear that the Delhi assembly election remains a cliff-hanger. And we don’t know how voters will react to so many last-minute news developments, ranging from the AAP funding scam to the booth-level push organised by Amit Shah. When she reaches the EVM machine, will Delhi’s voter have changed her mind?
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