KOLKATA: Almost all major agencies that conducted exit polls indicated BJP would win more seats in Bengal than Trinamool Congress in the just-concluded Lok Sabha elections.
The Axis-My India poll predicted the best outcome for Bengal BJP, giving it 26-31 seats as against 11-14 to Trinamool, and 2 to Congres-Left. It predicted a jump in BJP's vote share to 46% in the state.Among the others, ABP-CVoter predicted 23-27 seats for BJP, 13-17 for Trinamool and 1-3 for Congress-Left while Republic-Matrize gave BJ-25 seats, Trinamool 16-20 and Congress-Left only 1. Times Now-ETG predicted a neck-and-neck fight with BJP bagging 21 seats, Trinamool 20 and Congress-Left 1.
Trinamool chose not to speak officially on the exit poll results for Bengal but asked people to wait till the counting of votes on June 4. "We saw how wrong most of these agencies were in predicting the 2021 assembly poll result," a party senior said.
Arunachal PradeshSikkimArunachal PradeshSeats: 60ResultsMajority: 31BJP46NPP5CONG1OTH8Results: 60/60BJP WONSikkimSeats: 32ResultsMajority: 17SKM31SDF1BJP0CONG0OTH0Results: 32/32SKM WONSource: PvalueTrinamool spokesperson Saket Gokhale alleged without naming any agency that at least one pollster had BJP links and urged people to wait for the "actual results". Citing the 2021 assembly poll predictions, Trinamool seniors also questioned the "credibility" of the agencies conducting exit polls. Most of these agencies had predicted a much closer Trinamool-BJP margin in the 294-seat state assembly, with some of them predicting a majority for BJP, they said.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the exit polls had predicted a spike in BJP's vote share in Bengal, which corroborated with the final results as the party took home 18 Lok Sabha seats with a staggering 40% vote share. Surprisingly, the same pollsters were way off the mark two years later with their forecast for the 2021 assembly polls. They predicted BJP's Bengal growth story would continue and it would win 109-162 seats and gave Trinamool 130-162 seats. After the votes were counted, BJP had 77 seats and Trinamool 215.