Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s position in Gujarat today is similar to that of Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s before the last Lok Sabha elections. His popularity rating is high and so is the satisfaction level with his government. Even if they have not heard about “vibrant Gujarat,” people are receptive to his slogan. As of now, at the starting point of the race, his party is the front-runner. Yet something is amiss. He is more vulnerable than what these numbers show.

The Indian Express-CNN-IBN-Divya Bhaskar-CSDS Gujarat Poll shows that the BJP was 5 percentage points ahead of the Congress in the first week of November before nominations began. The poll had a sufficiently large sample of 3,893 respondents spread across every third constituency in the state, was randomly selected and was thus fairly representative of all the diversities of the state’s electorate (See methodology box on Page 4).

Such a survey should not be off by more than one or two points. This lead does not appear to be simply due to fear among the respondents leading to over-reporting in favour of the BJP. We took special precautions in this survey to detect and correct for this type of over-reporting for the ruling party.

Taking everything into account, we estimate that at the time of this survey, the BJP’s share of popular vote stood at 45 per cent, compared to 40 per cent for the Congress. There was no evidence of a noticeable surge for the BSP or any other party in the state. Pre-poll surveys like this one tend to under-estimate smaller parties but we can at least be sure that there is as yet no big third player in this election.

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