Rajasthan, which will be one of the most keenly watched states going to polls, is likely to see the 'revolving door' trend, with BJP wresting back the desert state from Congress, according to a survey conducted by ABP-CVoter. Rajasthan will see single phase polling on November 23. Votes will be counted on December 3.
As per the survey, conducted in first week of October, BJP is slated to win anywhere between 127 to 137 seats in the 200-member Assembly. The majority mark for a party to form the government is 101. The saffron party is likely to get around 46 per cent of the votes, a jump from the 38 per cent it received in the 2018 election.
On the other hand, Congress is likely to bag between 59 to 69 seats, with a vote share of 42 per cent.
Battling anti-incumbency, Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot will have his task cut out to retain the state, which has not voted the ruling party to power since 1998. The BJP has cornered the Congress over repeated cases of question paper leaks in the state and the "red diary" episode, which was referred to by former minister Rajendra Gudha.
Gudha, who was sacked by Gehlot and later joined Shiv Sena, claimed he had a "red diary" containing details of financial irregularities involving the Chief Minister and his aides.
READ | Rajasthan Election 2023: Single Phase Polls On November 23. Check Poll Schedule
The outcome in Rajasthan, which sends 25 MPs to Parliament, will be a bellwether for what lies in store ahead of the general elections in 2024.
In the 2018 election, Congress made a comeback in the desert state by winning 99 seats, while BJP secured 73 seats. The Congress then formed the government with the support of independents.
This time, both Congress and BJP are battling factionalism within their ranks. While Congress seems to have got its house in order after Sachin Pilot buried the hatchet with Gehlot and the duo publicly posed for pcitures together in June after intervention by the party leadership. Congress announced that the warring leaders would unitedly fight the Assembly election.
BJP, on the other hand, has also been plagued by inflighting between factions led by former chief minister Vasundhara Raje and Union minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat. The saffron party has gone all out to wrest back Rajasthan, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi visiting the state more than 10 times in the past one year.
[Methodology: Current survey findings and projections are based on CVoter Pre Poll personal interviews (Face to Face) conducted among 18+ adults statewide, all confirmed voters (sample size 30,044). 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. Our final data file has Socio-Economic profile within +/- 1% of the Demographic profile of the State. We believe this will give the closest possible trends. The sample spread is across all Assembly segments in the poll bound state. MoE is +/- 3% at macro level and +/- 5% at micro level VOTE SHARE projection with 95% Confidence interval.]