Our UP Articles: What worked, What did not
Subhash Chandra & Amitabh 'Suryakiran' Tiwari
On UP, all my own and articles with Politicalbaaba are listed here. There are 60 plus such articles.
We want to be accountable to be our readers, therefore we are listing a summary of what went wrong and what went right with our analysis. These are opinions we held until the end. There are some we changed as the situation evolved, we only consider the final opinion on the issue.
What went right
a. We called out fairly early that BJP should not have a CM candidate because of its umbrella caste strategy and also because of the absence of viable leader who could break the caste barrier. We were in two minds once SP-INC announced an alliance but realised it still did not make sense. Our 3 pillar strategy was exactly how the BJP went about their campaign and it helped them significantly As SP began to pick up in the polls, we listed out a variety of options for Mr Amit Shah, at the end he chose collective leadership and took full advantage of Mayawati's decision to give tickets to numerous Muslim Candidates
b. We called out quite early that Mayawati would struggle without an alliance. Behenji knows UP like the back of her palm and it was quite tragic at the end to see her fail to read the situation twice in a row (2014 and 2017). The attraction for a BSP ticket will be far less in 2019 and that could put significant funding pressures on her and rest of the opposition
c. As the campaigning progressed we called out in January that OBCs (Non Yadavs) and Dalits would determine the final election result. With BJP dominating amongst OBCs and picking up a large proportion of the non-jatav dalit votes, this indeed proved to be the deciding factor in the election. These two groups alone may have contributed to some 60% of the BJP vote in UP
d. We predicted fairly early that Prashant Kishor would struggle in UP given the State of the politics in UP and the condition of the party there. This came true.
e. In January we spoke about the brilliant Sunil Kanogulu who is the new Political Consultant Superstar having ran a brilliant campaign in Tamil Nadu and now having assisted Amit Shah to an outrageous win in Uttar Pradesh. We also spoke about the BJP organisational power structure in that article, much of which is now well acknowledged
f. We anticipated that Demonetisation would have a positive impact on the BJP campaign in UP and little impact in Punjab. While it is unclear if there is an established correlation, it is confirmed that demonetisation did not have a negative impact on its chances in Uttar Pradesh
g. We anticipated that Muslims would be confused by their choices and in the end, numerous Muslim candidates lost the election in large muslim population constituencies as they ended up splitting their vote between SP and BSP
What went wrong
a. While we had spoken about a BJP landslide 2-3 times, we never anticipated that it would ever happen. It was a possibility but we guessed that Akhilesh would reduce the gap and the best BJP could get is a simple majority. The super landslide was something we never anticipated
b. We expected SP-INC to do much better than they actually performed. Our belief was bolstered by polls in middle of August last year when Akhilesh began to pick momentum. The momentum fizzled out by December and went further downwards in January. While the broad agenda was to expand the voting base beyond the Muslim Yadav base, the strategy to project Akhilesh beyond these groups failed. I can think of many reasons for that but we are still looking for a data driven explanation for that failure. In January, we had predicted some reasons why SP-INC would struggle.
c. We anticipated SP-INC to make headway amongst youth and women. None of the reports appear to suggest that such a headway was made.
d. We anticipated Mayawati to retain most of the Dalit vote but it appears her choice of a large number of Muslim candidates pushed her core dalit voters to BJP primarily because BJP was far cleverer with their choice of candidates
e. We anticipated that Demonetisation would push Mayawati to seek an alliance with the Congress party. But like the rest of the opposition, she miscalculated the impact of demonetisation on voters
f. In October we heard news that BJP will announce a CM candidate, this never happened. We evaluated Rajnath Singh's chances which were mixed.
Overall, the writing experience was much better than when we wrote during the Bihar election. We rely a lot on public surveys, census and election commission data, field visits, conversations with campaign managers in all the parties and finally on news reports and therefore cannot claim to know more than the best experts. It is with humility that we decided not to put forth forecasts this time around because we just did not have enough information and have had bad experiences in the past. We did not want to confuse our readers. We hope you enjoyed our articles and look forward to your continued support
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