New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi notched up an impressive strike rate in these Lok Sabha elections with his party securing victories in 114 of the 142 Lok Sabha seats he campaigned in.
In effect, the BJP won 80 per cent of the seats where the prime minister conducted rallies.
Apart from the 142 public rallies, Modi held four roadshows, with a third of his rallies conducted in Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, where the party has seen unprecedented success.
Modi’s strike rate is an improvement from the last two times he was on the road for elections.
In 2018, during assembly elections in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, Modi held rallies in 27 constituencies of which the BJP won in 13 — a strike rate of 48 per cent.
A year earlier, during the 2017 assembly elections, Modi campaigned in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Goa and Manipur, holding rallies in over 180 seats. His party won in 140 of them at a nationwide strike rate of 78 per cent.
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Sweep in the Hindi heartland
Modi kicked off his 51-day long campaign from the Hindi heartland, holding his first rally at Meerut in Uttar Pradesh on 28 March.
He held 60 rallies in the Hindi heartland states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, a region that his party has swept.
In Uttar Pradesh, the prime minister covered 30 Lok Sabha seats, of which his party won in 23 — a strike rate of 76 per cent.
In Madhya Pradesh, the BJP won in all 11 Lok Sabha seats that Modi conducted rallies in at a strike rate of 100 per cent.
The party repeated the feat in Bihar where the BJP is in an alliance with Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United). Modi held nine rallies in Bihar and the alliance won all the seats.
In Chhattisgarh, where BJP was swept away by the Congress in the 2018 assembly elections, Modi conducted three rallies, of which his party won two at a strike rate of 66 per cent.
Also read: BJP crushes Congress hopes in Rajasthan, MP & Chhattisgarh, set to sweep all 3 states
Gains in the East, losses in TN, Kerala
West Bengal, the state where BJP was expecting to gain new ground, Modi held rallies in 16 seats, with his party winning in half of them, a strike rate of 50 per cent.
Modi also held rallies in eight Lok Sabha seats of Odisha, of which the party won in five seats, a strike rate of 62.5 per cent.
In Assam, despite facing criticism for the controversial Citizenship Amendment Bill, BJP won all the three seats where Modi campaigned.
It was a similar story in Maharashtra and Gujarat where Modi held rallies in 16 constituencies with the BJP and its allies winning in all of them.
Barring Karnataka, however, the prime minister’s worst show was in the south. In Karnataka, the BJP won all the seven seats Modi campaigned in.
In Kerala and Tamil Nadu, however, Modi held five rallies in total in which the BJP and its allies lost four. The only win was an AIADMK victory in the Theni Lok Sabha constituency.
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The Print needs to hire a statistician or the journalists need to learn basic statistics. BJP won 70% of the seats it contested. Therefore, the extra bump from Modi rally is ~10%. You can also normalize this to the probability of BJP winning a seat in state whether Modi held a rally or not. If the probability is close to 80%, then the extra bump is zero.