Cicero Associates Delhi Survey AAP opens survey data for public scrutiny, step towards transparency Delhi’s political mood is swinging rapidly. Aam Aadmi Party is riding an electoral wave unprecedented in Delhi in the recent times as the ruling party has hit its lowest and the BJP is stagnating. As many as 47 per cent of Delhiites wish to give Aam Aadmi Party a chance to form the Government, as against only 33 per cent for the BJP, and 27 per cent for the Congress. While the BJP and the Congress have reached their saturation point in converting their support into votes, Aam Aadmi Party has a large head room for further growth in the next two months. Party’s leader Arvind Kejriwal is way ahead of Sheila Dikshit and Vijay Goel in Chief Ministerial popularity ranking. A survey of the representative sample of Delhi’s electorate shows that Aam Aadmi Party has the largest pool of potential voters. When asked if the Aam Aadmi Party should get a chance to form the government, as many as 47 per cent respondents were favorable to the idea versus 31 per cent who were against it. For the current Congress government, only 27 percent were in favor while as many as 62 percent respondents were against giving it another chance. In the case of the BJP too the proportion who wanted to give it a chance was just 33 percent, much less that the 52 per cent who were against it. As of now, the conversion of this potential support into votes is higher for the older parties like the Congress and the BJP. Most of their potential supporters indicated that they will also vote for Congress of the BJP respectively. In the case of Aam Aadmi Party, however, its name recognition and election symbol recognition is yet to penetrate the entire population. In this survey, 14 per cent voters of Delhi did not recognize the name of Aam Aadmi Party. One-third could not identify the party’s recently acquired symbol – the broom. Once this awareness spreads further, the Aam Aadmi Party has considerable space to convert it supporters into voters. Given its growth rate, it can convert much more than the current ratio of a little over half of its potential support of 47 per cent into voters. If elections were held in the last week of August when this survey was carried out, the BJP would have secured 31 per cent votes, followed by Aam Aadmi Party with 27 per cent and the Congress with 26 per cent. This indicates a dramatic shift in political fortunes in the last six months. Since the first round of this survey in February, the Congress has lost 9 percentage points; BJP has lost 4 percentage points; while AAP has registered a significant swing of 13 percentage points in its favor. If the same trend continues in the next two months, the AAP can emerge a clear winner. A further loss of 4 points for the Congress and 2 points for the BJP is all that it would take for AAP to surge ahead and win majority of seats in the assembly. Usually electoral waves tend to intensify closer to the elections; in such a situation the broom could truly sweep Delhi’s polls. The biggest strength of Aam Aadmi Party is that Arvind Kejriwal is way ahead of other contenders in the Chief Ministerial race. When given a choice among three leading contenders, 41 percent preferred Arvind Kejriwal as the next CM, followed by 20 percent for Shiela Dikshit and 14 percent for Vijay Goel. This reflects a significant surge in Arvind Kejriwal’s popularity in the last six months. Unlike the other two, his popularity level is higher than the vote share for his party and can serve as a lever to pull the party’s performance. His name is now recognized by 90 per cent of Delhi’s population. AAP has higher than average vote among migrants from UP and Haryana, Delhi’s rural belt and residents of unauthorized and resettlement colonies. Its performance is the strongest among young voters between the age of 25-35 years, and among the poor and the very poor. It has emerged as a serious challenger to the Congress among Muslim and Dalit voters and to the BJP among the Sikhs. Its potential among senior citizens and migrants from Punjab is as yet under-achieved. This survey was conducted in the last week of August by Cicero Associates, a Delhi based public opinion and political consultancy firm and was overseen by its Director Mr. Dhananjai Joshi. The objective of this survey was to update all the key findings of the first round of survey conducted by Cicero Associates for AAP in February 2013. The second wave of the survey followed the same design as the first. A total of 3310 respondents were interviewed in the first wave, while 3325 were interviewed in the second wave. The respondents were scientifically selected from the electoral rolls of 175 polling booths spread across 35 Assembly Constituencies. All Assembly Constituencies, Polling Booths and respondents were sampled using the Systematic Random Sampling Technique. Selective substitution of 9 percent was permitted under strict protocols. All interviews were conducted face-to-face using a standard-structured questionnaire and a dummy ballot was used for voting questions. In keeping with its philosophy of transparency in public life, Aam Aadmi Party invites all those who wish to check the survey for its authenticity. We call upon other political parties and media houses that are releasing opinion poll based projections to practice the same degree of transparency and open their raw data files and questionnaire for public scrutiny and examination. Donate Volunteer Support Clean Politics and AAP Follow on Facebook Follow on Twitter
Posted on: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 04:20:57 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015