New Delhi: The overwhelming popularity and ratings of Prime Minister Narendra Modi seem to be negating all the anti-incumbency sentiments of voters in Himachal Pradesh where elections have been scheduled for November 12.
This was revealed by a CVoter opinion poll conducted on behalf of ABP News across the state during September and October.
Three results of the exclusive opinion poll stand out. The rise is anger with the performance of the state government. As many as 45.5 per cent of the respondents stated that they are angry and want to change the government.
Less than half of that, or about 22 per cent said they are not happy with the BJP government and want to change it. Similarly, 36.6 per cent of the voters rate the performance of the state government as good while 34.6 per cent rate it as poor.
Then again, results of the exclusive CVoter survey for ABP News show that while 37.6 per cent of respondents rate the performance of Chief Minister Jairam Thakur as good, as many as 33.7 per cent rated his performance as poor.
In most elections, these numbers would have resulted in high probabilities of the state government being ousted during elections because of high anti-incumbency sentiments.
Yet, the CVoter opinion poll reveals that the BJP is slated to win 46 per cent of the vote share while the Congress is projected to win 35.2 per cent with the Aam Aadmi Party managing 6.3 per cent. The projected gap between the BJP and Congress vote share is more than 10 per cent, it was just about 7 per cent in the previous elections in 2017.
The projected seats for the BJP are 42 while that for the Congress are 24, giving the former a comfortable majority in a house of 68 members.
The primary reason for this is the enduring popularity of Modi. While 64.3 per cent of respondents rated the performance of the Prime Minister as good, only 19.4 per cent rated it as poor. This is reminiscent of elections held in another hill state Uttarakhand in early 2022 where strong ant-incumbency sentiments against the BJP state government were negated by the Modi factor.
The actual results will be known on December 10.
(IANS)
