NEW DELHI: BJP is set to retain Uttar Pradesh with a comfortable majority in the state assembly elections due early next year, a Times Now-Polstrat opinion poll has projected.
BJP is projected to win 239 to 245 of the 403 seats, with the Samajwadi Party finishing a distant second with 119-125 seats, though more than doubling its 2017 tally. BSP is projected to lose a significant share of its votes to both SP and BJP and finish third with around 30 seats, while Congress could end up with five to eight seats, not very different from the seven it won in 2017.
If the projections turn out to be accurate, Yogi Adityanath would become the first chief minister in Uttar Pradesh to serve two consecutive terms.
The opinion poll indicated strong support for the Yogi government’s hard-line approach on law and order as well as, to a lesser extent, for its legal route to countering ‘forced’ conversions. On the Citizenship Amendment Act, however, opinion was more equally divided, with nearly half of the respondents seeing the Yogi government’s defence of it as an attempt to promote communalism. The poll also suggests that BJP’s charge of “Muslim appeasement” against SP and Congress has found resonance among the respondents.
The opinion poll was conducted between November 6 and November 10 with a sample size of 9,000 respondents. The margin of error for the data is 3% with a confidence interval of 95%.
According to C-Voter survey, the BJP and allies are projected to win 213 to 221 seats in 2022 assembly polls. The SP and its alliance partners are expected to win 152 to 160 seats this time. The BSP is likely to win just 16 to 20 seats. Congress party is likely to grab 6 to 10 seats.
