BJP gains ground in Assembly polls after Lok Sabha elections
NEW DELHI: In a display of electoral resilience, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has managed to regain significant ground in almost all the states that had Assembly elections after the general election 2024, in which BJP, for the first time since 2014, failed to match the single party majority notch.
In Haryana, BJP had won only 5 of the state’s 10 Lok Sabha seats (50%) in 2024 with 46.11% of the popular vote share. Bouncing back impressively in the Assembly polls held in October last year, it secured 48 out of 90 seats—over 53% of the assembly—with a lower vote share of 39.94%. The BJP’s ability to convert votes efficiently into seats enabled this turnaround despite the drop in popular support.
A similar pattern unfolded in Maharashtra, where the BJP-NDA alliance suffered considerable setbacks during the Lok Sabha polls, managing to win only 17 of 48 seats (35.42%), with BJP alone bagging just 9 seats and polling 26.18% of the vote. Yet in the state assembly elections held later, the BJP-led NDA not only expanded its seat share to 132 of 288 (45.83%) but also saw a marginal increase in vote share to 26.77%.
In Delhi, BJP defeated AAP – once considered invincible by many. AAP, which bagged 62 out of 70 seats during the 2020 Assembly Elections, was reduced to one third of its previous performance.
Odisha and J&K were no different. In Odisha, the BJP formed the government for the first time, after winning 78 of 147 assembly seats (53.06%). It also bagged 20 of 21 seats in Lok Sabha, whose election took place simultaneously with the Assembly.
In J&K, where BJP faced a relatively weaker Lok Sabha showing (2 of 5 seats, 24.36% votes), it improved its vote share to 25.64% and won 29 assembly seats. The lone outlier was Jharkhand, where the BJP’s vote share dropped from 47.17% in the Lok Sabha polls to 33.18% in the assembly elections, leading to a modest performance of just 24 seats out of 81 (29.63%).
Overall pattern suggests that barring Jharkhand, the BJP has possibly reversed its Lok Sabha losses in state polls. More crucially, the party’s long-standing strength in maximising seat conversion with relatively lower vote shares continues to give it an edge under the First Past the Post model—ensuring it stays electorally competitive even in adverse conditions.