Hung House, NDA’s ceiling doesn’t touch 272

In the exit poll in UP, the Samajwadi Party is leading the pack with 10 (out of the 32 that went to polls today), followed by the BSP with nine, the BJP with eight and the Congress with five seats.

The NDA’s main success so far has come from Karnataka and it has managed to hold on to its position in Maharashtra. In Karnataka, the BJP and allies are expected to get 20 out of 28 and the Congress only six.

In Maharashtra, despite the tie-up, the Congress-NCP combine is likely to get 22 of the 48 seats and the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance is likely to get 25.

The bad news for Chandrababu Naidu and the NDA in the first phase of the exit polls in Andhra Pradesh has been confirmed in Phase II and there are clear indications that the TDP seats will be reduced to a single digit. The poll projects the TDP-BJP tally to plummet from 36 to six while the Congress-TDP alliance is likely to go up from five to 35. In Bihar, too, the findings of the exit poll in the first phase are repeated in the second phase. This would also mean a loss of seats for the NDA.

In the 28 seats that went to the polls in the first two phases, the NDA is likely to get 10 while RJD and allies may get 18. In UP, early indications in the first phase of exit polls suggest that the BJP is likely to lose some seats. The battle is wide open and the NDA needs to do significantly well in the next two phases of polling, and in particular in UP, if it is to hit the halfway mark.

METHODOLOGY: The Indian Express and New Delhi Television (NDTV) have jointly commissioned A C Nielsen, a leading market research agency, to conduct fieldwork for a series of opinion and exit polls to gauge the voting intentions of the electorate.

The exit polls are conducted in four phases—to correspond with the four phases of the elections. Ten large states have gone to the polls in the first two rounds on April 20 and April 26.

Of these 10, polling covered all the seats in two states, Gujarat and Chhattisgarh, in the first phase. In the second phase, the elections were completed in six other states— Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Assam and Orissa.

In Bihar, voting is being conducted in three phases, with the Phase II voting to be held on May 5. In UP, the April-26 phase is the first phase, with two more phases to come.

The projections for Phase I and Phase II are based on exit polls, while those for Phase III are computed from the results of opinion polls. The national projection in this article based on a three-fold aggregation. For the seats that have already voted, the projection is based on the exit polls. For all the other seats (that will go to the polls in the last two phases on May 3 and May 10), the projection is based on the opinion poll completed in mid-March.

But some words of caution. All polls—opinion and exit—are subject to margins of error. The sampling error in this poll differs across the different states, with the highest range of error not exceeding 3%.