Should Rahul, Priyanka Enter LS Fray From Amethi, Raebareli? Here’s What ABP-CVoter Survey Finds

Even as the suspense over Congress’s choice of candidates for the two constituencies persists, ABP-CVoter asked people if Rahul and Priyanka should contest Amethi and Raebareli in a recent survey.

A question that has doubtlessly visited many minds going into the Lok Sabha elections, the dates for which will be notified on Saturday, is whether the Gandhis should contest Amethi and Raebareli, two constituencies that were long considered Congress “pocket boroughs”. Former Congress national president Sonia Gandhi, who was the sitting MP from Raebareli in the Lok Sabha, resigned her membership of the Lower House and entered the Rajya Sabha, instead, from Jaipur earlier this year, possibly making way for her son Rahul Gandhi or daughter Priyanka Gandhi Vadra to be elected from the party stronghold.

Announcing her decision to step away on grounds of age and failing health in a heartfelt open letter to the people of Raebareli, Sonia invoked the strong ties that the Nehru-Gandhi family has had with the constituency and urged voters to repose their faith in the Congress.

Amid buzz that Rahul might enter the fray for the Lok Sabha this time from two seats — Wayanad in Kerala that he represents currently in the Lower House and Amethi, the Congress named him from the constituency lying south of the Vindhyas in its first list for the Lok Sabha elections but intriguingly did not announce its picks for Amethi and Raebareli.

Even in its second list, which was unveiled recently, the grand old party skipped mention of its picks from these two seats.

So, even as the suspense over the Congress’s choice of candidates for these two constituencies persists, ABP-CVoter asked the people if Rahul and Priyanka should contest Amethi and Raebareli in a recent survey.

On whether the Gandhi siblings should be on the Congress tickets for these two seats, a significant percentage of the respondents, comprising both Opposition and NDA voters, answered in the affirmative.

Asked if Rahul should also contest Amethi, 58.2 per cent of Opposition voters said ‘yes’ while 18.9 per cent responded in the negative. However, the NDA voters came up with a mixed response to the same question, with 39.9 per cent saying ‘yes’ and 33 per cent replied in the negative.

On whether Priyanka should make her electoral debut from Raebareli, as many as 62.9 per cent of Opposition respondents responded in the affirmative while 15.4 per cent said ‘no’. Among NDA voters, 44.4 per cent said ‘yes’ to the same question and 26.6 per cent responded in the negative.

Further, a combined 49.1 per cent of respondents said Rahul should pit himself against sitting MP and Union Minister Smriti Irani again from Amethi while 53.7 per cent said Priyanka should enter the Lok Sabha fray from the seat her mother vacated.

[Disclaimer: Current survey findings and projections are based on CVoter Opinion Poll Computer Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI) conducted among 41,762 adults, all confirmed voters. The surveys were conducted from February 1 to March 10, 2024. The data is weighted to the known demographic profile of the States. Sometimes the table figures do not sum to 100 due to the effects of rounding. The final data has socio-economic profiles within +/- 1% of the demographic profile of the states. We believe this will give the closest possible trends. The sample spread is across all 543 electoral constituencies in the country. The margin of error is +/- 5% and the vote share projections have been done with 95% confidence interval.]