AERIAL VIEW
The latest pre-poll survey conducted by ABP CVoter has projected 19-23 seats for the BJP while the survey conducted by Times Now has put 17-21 seats in its kitty. The Opinion polls say Congress is expected to face another poll debacle and may end up winning 5-6 seats.
Clearly, the opinion polls seemed to have been fixed. In reality, BJP may cross the 10-mark but is unlikely to go beyond 15. as the wave is against them.
The Aam Aadmi Party has been doing exceedingly well and could emerge as the strong force, but Opinion polls have wrongly underestimated the Congress.
Though Congress has lost many big leaders, that has become a blessing in disguise as the party can field fresh faces and could clearly emerge as a significant force to reckon with.
SURAJ NANDREKAR
Editor, Goemkarponn
Every election, opinion polls rule the media coverage. Armed with statistics, pollsters predict winners and losers.
But how accurate are these opinion polls?
Not really, finds a recent study. With Goa scheduled to go to the polls on February 14, next month, many national channels and pollsters have begun the opinion polls.
In Goa, against the run of play, many pollsters are giving the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) a whopping 22 seats – a figure which seems unrealistic.
With just over a month to go for Assembly elections in Goa, two opinion poll surveys have predicted that the BJP may emerge victorious by a close margin while the Aam Aadmi Party may end up emerging as the main opposition party.
The latest pre-poll survey conducted by ABP CVoter has projected 19-23 seats for the BJP, while the survey conducted by Times Now has put 17-21 seats in its kitty. The Opinion polls say Congress is expected to face another poll debacle and may end up winning 5-6 seats.
Clearly, the opinion polls seemed to have been fixed. In reality, BJP may cross the 10-mark but is unlikely to go beyond 15. as the wave is against them.
The Aam Aadmi Party has been doing exceedingly well and could emerge as the strong force, but Opinion polls have wrongly underestimated the Congress.
Though Congress has lost many big leaders, that has become a blessing in disguise as the party can field fresh faces and could clearly emerge as a significant force to reckon with.
The BJP, on the other hand, has lost popularity, and unless the saffron party successfully polarises the votes, their victory seems impossible for now.
The anti-incumbency against the BJP is very high, and not many would give them a chance to come back to power and that too with the absolute majority, but the opinion polls do.
After the demise of late chief minister Manohar Parrikar, Dr Pramod Sawant has failed to win the people’s trust.
Though he has successfully retained his chair by engineering defections in Opposition parties, he has failed to win the trust of Goans.
The Mhadei issue, the three-linear project at Mollem, the mining crisis, unemployment, law and order, mismanagement of COVID19 second wave the list goes on and on, and the State has been on the boil over these reasons.
But when the opinion polls are conducted, all these factors are not considered. The media houses sitting in Delhi or elsewhere cook up the table-top stories to hoodwink the voters.
Looking at the current opinion poll, which gives BJP 22 to 26 seats, is it a reality or a creation of illusion to misguide the voters.
The difference between actual election outcomes and the mean prediction is known as error. The nearer the error is to zero, the closer is the prediction to the actual outcome.
Maybe these TV channels and the pollsters have been speaking about a scenario of what happened post-2017 when BJP, despite getting 13 seats, managed to tally to 27 by engineering defections. So maybe these Opinion Polls are already taking into consideration the defections.
The anathema of defections has been a prominent feature of Goa’s political discourse.
Rampant instances of defections across parties became a modus operandi of Goan politics resulting in incessant dislodging of democratically elected governments by rival parties through orchestrated defection.
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