Mumbai : The Modi wave that swept the nation during the parliamentary election in May this year is still intact and will help the saffron grand alliance (Mahayuti) to fetch around 200 seats, a new opinion poll by the ABP News-Neilsen has predicted.
The Opinion Poll reveals that the BJP is set to garner 107 seats; while Congress is likely to bag around 40 as compared to 82 seats and NCP is predicted to shrink to 25 as compared to 62 seats in the 2009 polls.
62% of the respondents feel that Mahayuti – BJP, Shiv Sena, RPI, SWP, RSP – would emerge winners in the poll that takes place on October 15. Counting would be held on October 19.
Interestingly, almost over a quarter (26%) of all respondents surveyed have preferred the present CM Prithviraj Chavan as the best suited chief minister of the state. But, more than half of respondents (53%) said they would not vote for Congress even if Prithviraj Chavan is projected as the CM candidate of the party despite his good image.
Chavan is closely followed by Shiv Sena’s Uddhav Thackeray and BJP’s Devendra Fadnavis as the most suited CM.
According to the poll, the respondents have rated the performance of the Cong-NCP alliance over the last 5 years as ‘Average’ attaining a mean score of 3. Around 38% respondents feel the performance of the Cong-NCP alliance is average; while 24% term it as good and about 8% as very poor.
Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan’s performance has been rated as just above ‘average’ with a mean score of 3.3 with about two-fifth of respondents rating his performance as ‘Good’ or ‘Very good’.
What has dented Cong-NCP’s prospects? The ability to bring down inflation and corruption have been cited as the major reasons for this shift to BJP. Two-third of the respondents feel that allegations of corruption against the state government would affect the voting intention of people.
Slightly more number of people (43%) feel that providing reservation for Marathas and Muslims in jobs and education would benefit Cong-NCP as against those who feel that it will have negative impact (35%) on the alliance. 14% of respondents felt that reservation issue will not have any impact on the prospects of Cong-NCP in the upcoming elections.
The opinion poll was conducted by ABP News and Nielsen between August 24 and September 3 interviewing 12,973 respondents in 72 assembly constituencies.
