Gujarat Election: BJP supporters wave party flags during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s election campaign roadshow for the Gujarat Assembly elections, in Ahmedabad, Friday, Dec. 2, 2022. Photo Credit: PTI
The 2017 Gujarat election was a close affair with more than 30 seats with the winner being decided by a victory margin of less than 2.5% of the vote. But this was not the case this year. In 2022, the BJP will lead/win 51 seats with a margin of over 30%. Margin of victory is the difference in votes between the winner/leader and the second best party in a seat
Table 1 Shows the number of seats won/led by the parties in 2022 in various vote share categories. The change in the number of such seats since 2017 is also listed. For example, BJP led/won 157 seats. Among them, the lead/win margin was less than 10% in 26 seats, between 10-20% in 52 seats, between 20-30% in 28 seats and more than 30% in 51 seats. Overall, in 2022, 43 out of 182 seats had a lead/win margin of less than 10% of the vote. In 2017, 44 more seats were won with a vote margin of less than 10%. Sharp increase in lead/number of seats won by more than 30% votes and fall in number of seats won/lead by <10% votes shows that 2022 Gujarat election was not a tight race unlike 2017
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Table 2 Takes a closer look at the number of seats won/led by a relatively small number of votes. A win/lead margin of less than 2.5% suggests that the race was reduced to a handful of votes. Overall, in 2022, 13 seats had an edge/win margin of <2.5% of the vote. In 2017, it had won 19 more seats with the same margin. This figure further shows that it was not a close election.
Table 3 Shows the number of seats won/led by the parties in 2022 at various vote margins (in absolute terms). For example, in 2022, the BJP led/won 1 seat by a margin of less than 500 votes, and it led/won 141 seats by a margin of more than 10,000 votes. Overall, only 1 seat had a win/lead margin of <500 votes.