UP polls: Fore-cast not fore-warned

SITTING PRETTY: Mayawati has led BSP to a decisive victory in UP polls

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Rajdeep Sardesai

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We begin a series of post-mortems of the UP verdict by the CSDS team. The first part turns the searchlight within: what went wrong with the pollsters?

Instead of mounting her now-famous verbal assault on the ‘Manuwadi’ media, Mayawati preferred sarcasm in her opening statement in the first press conference after the election. Feigning to apologise for being inaccessible during the campaign, she said she did not wish to “disturb” the media while it was busy making all kinds of projections. Mayawati did not mention opinion and exit polls separately, but there is little doubt that these were her principal targets.

After the Lok Sabha poll of 2004, the assembly election of Uttar Pradesh is clearly an instance of collective failure of opinion and exit polls. In relative terms, The Indian Express-CNN-IBN-CSDS post poll can definitely claim to have been the best of the lot. Our forecast captured the trend accurately, projected the BSP way ahead of its rivals (we projected 152-168 seats for it), forewarned that the BSP could “do better than projected here” and said that the BJP will finish a poor third. Yet, as my colleague Rajeeva Karandikar put it, this was the case of the best not being good enough. The fact is that none of the polls, including ours, came close to suggesting a clear majority for the BSP.

This was a clear instance of the triumph of old-style political journalism over the new fangled number crunching. Political reporters may not have talked about a clear majority for the BSP, but they did capture the hawa. If you read the despatches by Manini Chatterjee, reportage by Vidya Subrahmaniam, articles by Mahesh Rangarajan or the field stories in papers like Jansatta and Amar Ujala - you got a clear sense of a decisive victory for the BSP.

There are three reasons why the polls were so off the mark. First, there was a sampling error, especially in the exit polls. In an exit poll, you don’t choose the person you wish to interview. The voter chooses to walk to or walk away from the investigator stationed outside the polling station. Unless systematic precautions are taken, chances are that any exit poll will over-represent the well-off and upper caste and under-represent the poor and lower caste. This has resulted in systematic under-estimation of the BSP and over-estimation of the BJP over the last decade.

Secondly, there was a response bias. Those who voted for the BSP were less likely to say so to an outsider. Non-dalits who voted for the BSP may have been unwilling to admit it to themselves. This very unusual situation led to an over-reporting for the SP and BJP.

Finally, the vote-seats equation in UP turned out to be very skewed this time. For every one per cent of its votes, the BSP won 6.8 seats, compared to 3.8 for the SP and 3.0 for the BJP. This meant that the BSP won a large number of seats with very small margins. Even if you could foresee the exact vote share of the BSP, it was difficult to forecast the number of its seats.