The good news for the UPA is that this resentment does not translate into big loss of votes and seats. Part of the reason is leadership: Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh continue to be rated and trusted more than Advani or any other Opposition leader in the electoral fray. The logic of state-level electoral cycle happens to favour the UPA. The BJP’s incumbency in some of its key states is old and beginning to hurt, while the tide has not turned against the UPA in the states that it rules.

Above all, what’s working for the UPA is its alliance arithmetic. If the current alliances persist in Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu and if the UPA can repeat the 2004 alliances in Bihar and Jharkhand, the combined votes of the alliance partners simply outnumber everyone else. While the UPA has held on to its large coalition, the NDA has been losing key partners like the TDP and the AIADMK. If the mid-term polls were held in the first week of September, when this nation-wide survey took place, the Congress and its existing allies would have secured 267 seats, just short of a clear majority, leaving the NDA way behind at 133 seats.

This would have meant a slight fall from the tally of 300 that the State of the Nation Poll series carried out by the CSDS had projected for the UPA in January this year. In the last six months, the UPA has shed about 4 percentage points of the national vote share, while the NDA has gone up by one point. Still the popular vote for the UPA is three points above what it had in 2004, while the NDA remains some seven points below its vote share in the last elections. Yet such a projection would mean a substantial gain for the UPA and a big decline for the NDA since the last elections held in 2004. If this happens, it would be the first time since 1991 that the Congress would cross the 200 seat mark and the first time since 1989 that the BJP would fail to touch three digits.

... contd.