BJP workers in Uttar Pradesh lost heart on Thursday, says AI and ML analyst

As Phase Two polls came to a close, the Gathbandhan and the Congress had a lot to celebrate in Uttar Pradesh. The BJP worker knew this by noon on Thursday.

We have been tracking a sample of polling booths to try and understand who was showing up as part of the overall turnout numbers the Election Commission releases. (To be clear: we are not asking questions or carrying out an exit poll).

As we looked at these numbers (polling percentage in the eight UP constituencies on April 18) there were three things that were abundantly clear:

• The anti-UPA vote that converted the pro-Modi vote to a tsunami that swept aside all contenders in 2014 is missing in Uttar Pradesh. Without it, the BJP is only competitive in its traditional boroughs.
• Secondly, there is still a group of people voting for Mr Modi (versus the classical BJP voter) — typically young voters who are deeply attracted to the idea of a strong leader — but there is also a group of voters who voted for him in 2014 who are not voting for the BJP this time.
• Thirdly, it’s these voters who’re staying home who are tipping the scales.

As we analysed trends emerging from the booths we are tracking, we believe it is now safe to presume that a significant portion of the Jat vote that is turning out is not voting for the BJP. The Dalit vote and Muslim votes also seem to have consolidated behind the Gathbandhan.

What surprised us today was how chatter amongst BJP workers died out between around 10 and 12 in the morning today. By the late afternoon, the BJP worker was openly saying there is no Modi wave left and were expressing a sense of betrayal — some of it directed towards their own party, but a lot of it towards voters they felt were betraying the country by not voting for Mr Modi.

We are doubling down on our pre-election models where we had predicted that the BJP was being over-indexed, and the Congress under-indexed. While pollsters did their best to predict outcomes for the SP-BSP-RLD Gathbandhan, almost all of them wondered about how votes would transfer. We believe that a model only based on raw vote-share numbers also naturally under-indexes the Gathbandhan.

If this performance continues in the next two phases, we believe the media narrative towards the Gathbandhan will shift and start calling it a “masterful political stroke” or some such moniker.

(Published first on Anthro.ai - a collection of anthropologists, mathematicians, data scientists and market specialists, studying the ongoing election in Uttar Pradesh as an experiment to test the tools and models they have developed to navigate complex human behavior. )