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title="Latest and Breaking News on News Agency" />Among the sources of entertainment this holiday season was viewing the many YouTube compilations of the election night coverage of major TV networks in the United States. Curated by small-time poll aggregators and angry MAGA (Make America Great Again) supporters, the hour-long videos provided vivid examples of the vacuousness of mainstream political punditry.
The Debacle In America
It was funny to observe how, when the polls closed, networks such as CNN, CBS and MSNBC were highlighting the surge in voter turnout among Puerto Ricans and on college campuses. It was suggested that these sections would tilt the balance in the five crucial swing states in favour of Kamala Harris who, the pundits felt, had run a “flawless campaign.” At this point, various opinion polls were produced to show that Donald Trump was the least acceptable candidate. Trump's pariah status was garnished by pious comments centred on the belief that an overwhelming majority of women attached greater priority to reproductive rights over the state of the economy. If these pious certitudes appear, in hindsight, to be quite ridiculous, the underlying humour behind the meltdown once it was clear that Trump had beaten Harris conclusively, was inescapable. The political analysts moved from analysing the votes to debunking the intelligence of voters and lamenting the future of the US.
If the global liberal fraternity failed to anticipate the underlying support for Trump and needed ‘safe zones' and counselling on the campuses to get over the trauma of an unpalatable electoral verdict, much of the responsibility lies with the pollsters. In poll after poll, these so-called independent pollsters had suggested that the outcome on November 5 was within the margin of error, and thus, too close to call. Was this due to sampling errors or social pressures that made those who voted for Trump wary of admitting this openly? This was certainly the case in the 2016 presidential election, and it speaks volumes for the political environment of the world's most powerful democracy, that supporters of the winner have to keep their preferences under wraps for fear of social ostracism.
Learning From Trump's Victory
The victory of Trump should, ideally, be a lesson to the presiding deities of the so-called ‘legacy media' and the polling industry to review their political assumptions. But the lessons aren't necessarily limited to the US. The three sets of elections held last year in India also warranted a clinical post-mortem which, alas, has not been forthcoming. Instead, the mismatch between what was projected and what transpired has been brushed aside casually, till the blunder the next time.
The most important lesson from the Lok Sabha poll and the subsequent assembly elections in Haryana and Maharashtra is the diminishing faith in pollsters. Most polls predicted a resounding BJP win in the Lok Sabha, a win for the Congress in Haryana and a small advantage for the BJP-led formation in Maharashtra. The pollsters failed to anticipate the big setbacks for the BJP in Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Haryana. Likewise, the BJP victory in the Odisha assembly was unanticipated. Subsequently, the victory of the BJP in Haryana and its clean sweep in Maharashtra went against prevailing conventional wisdom.
It is entirely possible that the main problem with Indian polling outfits is shoddy or, in some cases, non-existent fieldwork. To pursue a truly random sampling, as demanded by statisticians, is both time-consuming and expensive. Instead, what is being pursued is either telephone polls of questionable authenticity or findings based almost entirely on the judgments of a new breed of political analysts. Since many of those in media organisations and political parties are untutored in the art of analysing poll findings, it is possible for a growing tribe of charlatans to pull the wool over the eyes of their clients.
No Introspection
In the aftermath of the actual results, there has hardly been any known instance of those who commission opinion (and exit) polls doing a post-mortem of the quantum of variation with the actual results. This suggests that the errors (methodological or wilful), not to mention fraud, will be repeated in the next round of elections.
Unless media organisations develop a culture of accountability to their consumers, they, too, will experience the same ridicule that has been heaped on their liberal counterparts by the growing tribe of irreverent YouTubers.
As the party that experienced the most strategic setback in the Lok Sabha poll, it is to be expected that the BJP must have undertaken the most rigorous post-poll dissection to understand where it went wrong and what remedial steps to take. On the face of it, the findings of such an exercise have not been made public, and the promised ‘chintan', if any, has been conducted behind closed doors. Although the internal assessments of the BJP haven't been made public, certain broad conclusions are in order.
The Modi Cult
First, while it is understandable the BJP tried to turn a parliamentary election into a presidential election, there were significant distortions. The personality cult around Prime Minister Narendra Modi was centred almost exclusively on the report card of the past decade. What was on offer in the coming five years—apart from the generalities of Viksit Bharat—was not spelt out in any detail. It was the lack of specifics that made the campaign skewed. This meant that pressing local grievances were either given the go-by, as happened in central and eastern Uttar Pradesh. Alternatively, flawed local inputs compelled the Prime Minister to focus exclusively on local issues at the cost of a national outlook. Somehow, the BJP couldn't manage to strike an equilibrium between the Modi cult, the future and local complications. In many cases, the local units were overawed by the force and intensity of the national projection of Modi.
Flush With Resources
Secondly, as the ruling party, the BJP campaign was not expected to suffer from any resource crunch. However, what was experienced on the ground was the precise opposite. The BJP campaign was inundated with resources, much more than could be effectively managed. This meant that the focus of many campaigning teams became pecuniary rather than political. Rather than chasing votes, many campaigners chased campaign funds. In winnable seats, there was often a schism between the candidate and the organisation. In seats where the prospects were more distant, the focus was often on cost-cutting to maximise non-productive surplus. This was particularly so in states where the BJP doesn't have an entrenched machinery.
An unintended consequence of this superabundance of resources was that the traditional election strategy of maximising involvement in the outreach to the voters was compromised in favour of impersonal razzmatazz that limited involvement. There are reasons to believe that in many regions, there was a frostiness between the BJP organisation and the wider saffron fraternity.
Grassroots Tell A Different Story
Finally, if the opinion of the grassroots is any indication, the BJP campaign suffered on account of the leadership's over-reliance on political management consultancies who were entrusted with responsibilities ranging from advising on candidate selection to campaign feedback. While creating a channel that is independent of the party organisation creates alternative inputs, there are two dangers. First, the perceived importance of consultants can lead to the local party organisation retreating into a shell and becoming less active. Secondly, if the consultants fail to pick up important local trends, whether because of inexperience or ineptitude, the overall campaign can suffer.
It would be interesting to know, for example, whether the BJP misread the quantum of local anger in Ayodhya and Varanasi over the civic improvements. Moreover, was the party aware of the silent campaign centred on its supposed plan to scrap reservations that led to the Dalit community allying itself with the Samajwadi Party's Muslim-Yadav combination in Awadh and eastern Uttar Pradesh?
It is entirely possible that rather than washing dirty linen in public, the BJP has quietly gone about the task of taking remedial measures, and without public recriminations. After all, within a span of a few months, the party managed to retain Haryana, a state from which it had been written off after the parliamentary election. Much more significant, notwithstanding the criticism levelled against it for accommodating disreputable defectors and consequently losing the plot in Maharashtra in the Lok Sabha poll, the BJP stuck to the same alliance and won the Assembly election resoundingly.
No doubt caste alignments and leadership issues played their usual part in the BJP's success.
However, in both Haryana and Maharashtra, all reports suggested an energised grassroots campaign that involved personalised contact with the electorate. This implies that the relative indifference of the party's support and activist base— a feature of the recent Lok Sabha election—was absent in the Assembly election.
How Indian Voters Are Unique
In Europe and North America, voting behaviour invariably follows a social pattern. People vote as individuals but their individual preference is coloured by their ethnicity, income, education and gender. All these factors are present in India, with caste often taking the place of ethnicity and class in India.
There is, however, an additional complication. The state of a political organisation or network in the constituencies plays a huge role in determining electoral outcomes. Regardless of the passive support for parties, its translation into actual votes also depends on local triggers. The relative importance of local alignments varies from state to state. In states such as West Bengal, it is overwhelming, while in Rajasthan, it is low. There was an electoral malfunction in the BJP machinery in a few states that cost the party a Lok Sabha majority. This was addressed in the Assembly elections in Maharashtra and Haryana, such that they prompted the conclusion that the Lok Sabha election was a black swan event.
Such a conclusion, of course, would exonerate the pollsters from the grave charge of professional incompetence. The need for such generosity is unwarranted since the pollsters imagined they were swimming with the tide. They will continue to think that victory belongs to those who shout the loudest. For more discerning analysts, however, it will be necessary to blend the quantitative with an understanding of how the ground situation is.
Respect The Voter
A few days before November 5, a pollster with a reputation for being ‘gold standard' released a dramatic finding that in Iowa, a strong Republican state, Harris would beat Trump 47% to 44%. She detected a late swing of older women towards the Democrats on the issue of reproductive rights. The poll raised hopes among Harris supporters of a landslide win nationally. When the votes were counted, it revealed that the pollster was off the mark by a whopping 16 points. Trump won 56% of the votes to Harris's 42.7%. It wasn't even.
That pollster in Iowa has since shut shop and changed professions. However, what is one to make of the polling agencies that suggested that the BJP would win 25 seats in West Bengal and between eight and 10 in Tamil Nadu? By that logic, the BJP tally in 2024 would have crossed 400. In the end, the BJP managed 12 in Bengal and none in Tamil Nadu.
My lessons from 2024: discount (but don't totally disregard) the pollsters, and keep a sharp eye on politics on the ground. Respect the judgment of voters. In most cases, their instincts aren't way off the mark.
(The author is a former Rajya Sabha MP and Distinguished Fellow, India Foundation, New Delhi)