The Congress’s losses in the heartland states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh have not only overshadowed the party’s victory in Telangana but also been a huge sentiment and morale buster for the party before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. In fact, such is the shock of the defeat that the party’s leadership in Madhya Pradesh has taken to peddling bogus conspiracy theories about Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs). An HT analysis of the results in these three states shows that
- Congress’s vote share was virtually unchanged between 2018 and 2023Vote share is the best measure of a popular support for a party in any elections. On this count, the Congress did not do badly in these elections, as far as its own experience is concerned. Data shows that its vote share was virtually unchanged in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. In Rajasthan, it actually increased by 0.3 percentage points and in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh the fall was just 0.5 and 0.8 percentage points. In all three states, these vote shares are not too far off the mark from the Congress’s best performance in a long time. To put the numbers in simple language, the party leadership could have been thinking that its support levels this time are similar to what it had in the 2018 elections, and reasoned that it therefore had a good chance of winning the polls, just like it did the last time.
- Sharp fall in the party’s ability to convert votes into seatsThis is exactly where a first-past-the-post (FPTP) system is very difficult to predict. Whether or not a candidate actually wins an election depends on not just their own vote share but also that of the opponent. This means that hallmark of a good election strategy in an FPTP system is not just looking to increase or maintain popular support (vote share) but also ensuring that this actually converts to seats. This is where the 2023 elections in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh are very different for the Congress than the ones in 2018. One of the simplest ways to measure a party’s ability to convert popular support into seats in an FPTP system is to look at the seat share to vote share ratio. The seat share to vote share ratio of the Congress fell sharply between the 2018 and the 2023 elections which completely nullified its hard work of keeping its popular support intact. What explains this sharp fall?
- The heartland polls were among the most polarised in the history of the 3 statesUnless a party has a vote share of 50% of more, it is always vulnerable to consolidation of opposition votes in an FPTP system. One of the best ways to measure the degree of polarisation in an election is to look at the median value of constituency level Effective Number of Participants (ENOP, which is the reciprocal of sum of squares of vote share of every candidate in a constituency. An example can make this clear. If a constituency has only three candidates and their vote shares change from 25%, 35% and 40% to 10%, 35% and 55%, the ENOP value will fall from 2.9 to 2.3. An HT analysis of the election results shows that the median ENOP in the 2023 Rajasthan elections is the lowest since 1985. For Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, this number is the lowest since 1977, which is the earliest period for which a backdated Madhya Pradesh-Chhattisgarh divisions of constituencies can be done.
- The BJP aced the game of consolidating the anti-Congress votesThe fact that the Congress’s vote share was by and large intact between 2018 and 2023 means that, at least at the macro level, its voters did not desert it for the BJP in these elections. To be sure, this generalisation need not hold at the constituency level. Where the BJP seems to have excelled in this election cycle is in consolidating the voters who did not vote for either the BJP or the Congress in the 2018 elections. In other words, just guarding its own house was not good enough for the Congress to win, and it should have been more proactive in expanding its support base among voters who were not aligned to the BJP. This comparison looks even more interesting when compared with the change in vote share of the Congress, BJP and other parties between the 2013 and 2018 elections, when the Congress won all three states. The Congress’s 2018 victories came on the basis of a larger attrition of BJP voters than non-Congress non-BJP supporters. This raises an extremely important question for the Congress party. Is it missing the nuances of local politics in its zeal to create a polarisation against the BJP? This might have left it with a significant support base but one inadequate to win elections.
Roshan Kishore is the Data and Political Economy Editor at Hindustan Times. He heads the newsroom's data journalism team, which produces Number Theory, a daily data-driven feature for the print edition and the HT app. Number Theory uses data analysis and story-telling based on it to add value to the newsroom’s daily coverage by putting stories in a larger context on a range of issues, including politics, macroeconomy, markets, global affairs and climate. Under his leadership HT’s data journalism work has established itself as a niche product in Indian journalism and pushed the boundaries of marrying academic rigour with news sense and speed. Along with writing and editing data stories, he has also been writing a weekly political economy column called Terms of Trade for HT Premium. A trained economist with an MPhil degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Kishore has also been a visiting fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies of India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania. Along with his journalistic work, his writings have also appeared in journals such as the Economic and Political Weekly and working papers for CASI and UNESCAP.
Abhishek Jha is Assistant Editor-Data at Hindustan Times. He uses statistical programming to generate newsworthy insights from large datasets. He is part of the team that produces Number Theory, a daily data story feature of the paper’s print edition. Since March 2024, he has been writing Weather Bee, a weekly column for the Hindustan Times website. He is a chemical engineer by training, who specialises in stories related to weather, climate, and the environment. Jha has been at HT since 2018, where he offers data-driven perspective and analysis on politics, environment, weather, climate, economy and society. His work includes data coverage of elections in India and abroad, including the 2019 and 2024 Lok Sabha elections; the disasters and extreme weather resulting from changing climate, such as floods, droughts, heat waves, cold waves, and dwindling snow cap in the Himalayas; the factors that drive poor air quality in northern India; the changing patterns of land use; the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on labour market conditions; the changing pattern of consumer spending seen in the new consumer spending surveys; and social norms seen in the surveys such as the National Family Health Survey.