We started a Contest on 22nd January 2015, where in people from all over the world, could predict the results of the Delhi Assembly elections. The contest ended yesterday at 8pm, and now we wait for the results to see who got the the predictions right. Till then we decided to do some number crunching with the entries. Remember this is NOT an opinion of Delhi voters, but it is the opinion of people around the world, trying to guess how Delhi will vote. The analysis will not be affected by how the parties are campaigning in Delhi, but it will be affected by how the Media is covering it and reporting it. Also note that this is NOT a scientific survey. It is only a collection of responses.
Firstly, we saw that over almost two-thirds i.e. 67% of the respondents felt that BJP would get the majority in this election. Only 17% felt that AAP would get a majority in these election. The balance 16% felt that Delhi voters would throw up a hung assembly. It is amusing to note that 2 people felt that Congress will get a majority.
If one takes an average of all the responses, then the most likely outcome of Delhi Elections seems to be BJP getting a majority with 37 seats, AAP coming second with 26 seats, Congress getting 6 seats and others making up 2 seats. A similar simple average of all the Opinion Polls conducted till date also throws up similar numbers, with BJP getting 35 seats, AAP getting 30 seats, Congress getting 5 seats and others getting 1 seat.
We also decided to track the views of people over time, taking daily averages of seats predicted for each party. Plotted on a graph, it looks like this:
The singular most interesting phenomenon occurred on 28th January, which is the only time the average of the days predictions showed that more people felt AAP would get more seats than BJP. What could have happened on 28th January for this trend to change course so dramatically? Remember, we are looking for media events which could have influenced people all over the world. 28th January happens to be the day when the Ravish Kumar – Kiran Bedi interview was put up by NDTV! Although Ravish did not really do a major expose, and he used some underhand methods, its seems the interview affected people’s opinion and made them think maybe Delhi wont go BJP’s way. Also most of our entries come from Social Media users and the Interview was hyped as a major loss of face for Bedi on Social Media.
Another interesting thing is, contrary to Opinion Polls conducted by News channels, the opinions of our users did not drastically change from 22nd January till 6th of February. There is a very minor change in the seat predictions of each of the parties. If anything, AAP has lost a bit of ground from where it started.
All said and done, these opinions don’t matter much. The ones which do will be out on 10th February. Till then we have to make do with Opinion Polls and Exit Polls.
