Even though there have been widespread speculations since the general elections held in Odisha that the State’s ruling BJD would perform on a quite lesser scale than its landslide achievement in 2009, the results of the exit polls conducted by most of the national television channels have baffled political observers here.
The observers do not agree to these exit poll predictions, aired on Monday evening, and prefer to wait for May 16, the all-important day when the votes will be counted and announced.
While the exit poll done by leading English channel CNN-IBN showed the BJD winning 12-16 of the total 21 seats, the one conducted by Times Now and News Nation-ORG have each given it 15 seats.
The poll by ABP News, however, struck a rather widely discordant note predicting just nine seats for the BJD and as many as 10 to the BJP and the remaining two to the Congress, which is closer to the figures projected by independent poll analysts.
The CNN-IBN exit poll gave 3-7 seats to the BJP and 1-3 to the Congress while the Times Now projected 5 for the Congress and just 1 for the BJP.
The notable aspect of the CNN-IBN poll is the significant change in the vote share of two out of the three principal players. If the numbers given in the poll turns out to be correct then it would mean that while the BJD has more or less kept its vote share intact, the BJP has registered a massive gain in its vote share from a lowly 16.89 per cent in 2009 to 24 per cent this time.
This exit poll suggests that the BJD vote share has fallen only marginally from 37.2 per cent to 37 per cent while the share of the Congress has shrunk from 32.75 per cent in 2009 to 29 per cent this time.