So, who're you gonna vote for?

Perhaps like you for the past fortnight since dates for 2019 General Elections were announced whenever in a chatty mood in the back of a rickcab Ive casually strawpolled the driver on which way hes currently swinging at the hustings Let alone what route hes taking me through that I have little control over Either way the metaphor is completeAlso while my sample size belongs to Mumbai the metropolis probably holds half its roots in several parts of India notably Uttar Pradesh which for better or worse inevitably determines the hawa or windwave carrying a partycoalition to power at the CentreIn their recently released neatly summarised textbook The Verdict Decoding Indias Elections authors Prannoy Roy and Dorab Sopariwala who along with datascientist Ashok Lahiri pioneered election opinion polls in India with the first independent indepth survey carried out in 1980 speak of what they call the universal smileThats what mysteriously greets pollsters when they privately pry into peoples poll preferences which is primarily done in four waysat the street corner doortodoor before or after elections outside polling booths exit polls Or now more easily but therefore largely shadily on social mediaSurely opinion polls wouldve taken a global beating especially after US elections when Hillary Clintons victory was a given but the Donald trumped her in a complex web of what American elections are anywayThat said as RoySopariwala point out of 833 electoral opinion polls conducted over 40 years in India 75 per cent have remarkably managed to predict the winner this being the strike rate as against accurately forecasting number of seats which is toughest given statistical errors when the sample size is unavoidably low running into tens of thousands even within which peoples spotresponses may not match final outcomeFurthermore though at the Lok Sabha if you set aside one election the strikerate of opinion polls is a phenomenal 97 per cent That one outlier election defying analysis that everyone got wrong was in 2004 This is when NDA led by BJP had finished its maiden fullterm in power The current election draws to a close NDAs second completestintSince the first in 1952 to the last in December 2018 India has had 392 elections 16 to Lok Sabha and 376 to state assemblies Plodding through results in all RoySopariwala reveal three distinctive phases to explain voting behaviourtrendsThe first phase 195277 was about proincumbency where the electorate pretty much uniformly voted governments back to power The second between 1977 and 2002 was marked by antiincumbency when the voters preferred to rotate victors The next or the current one 2002 onwards is what the authors call 5050 which is the sort of chance the voter gives to a government to retain power presumably if its performed wellFrankly I read through RoySopariwalas book slowly word for word like a syllabus for an exam to crack And thats because these two gentlemen through their television analyses on NDTV and even before that on DD are entirely responsible for making elections at any rate the results day at once feverishly exciting and phenomenally insightful for generations whove rightly deemed electoral democracy as Indias mostloved sportAnd whys that Because India isnt a fair failsafe electoral democracy in the real sense Its firstpastthepost system makes every voting patternpolarisationpersonalityissue open to interpretation until the final word is in For rather than a majority you need only one vote more than the candidate placed second to rulerepresent the restExtrapolate that single constituency into a deeply heterogeneous populationnation and so 31 per cent votes for BJP translates into 52 per cent seats likewise 38 per cent votes for BJPled NDA means 61 per cent or 336545 seats unimaginably comfortable majority in the 2014 parliamentary elections With 19 per cent votes Congress enters with 8 per cent or 44 Lok Sabha membersMuch hence depends on terms like swing Index of Opposition Unity the strength of the rival coalition boothmanagement dark art of voter suppression that RoySopariwala introduce and clinically examine in their bookWherein currently they say 1 per cent swing in favour of a party and so subtracting the same from the rivals can lead to 15 Lok Sabha seats straight And it can always go either way although empirically tabulated there are 77 per cent chances of a landslide win for a party in a state at the Lok Sabha elections which when totaled decides who leads India for the next five yearsIve been getting a mix of smiles and indifferent scowls during my stray cabride strawpolls at the moment But heres one thing we know And this is from David Mamet legendary Hollywood screenwriter since thats another place that works singularly on profiting from gauging diverse public moodsopinions Of people Mamet is convinced Individually theyre idiots But collectively theyre genius cant fool them never met a dumb audience Yup think so too Okay hope so for sureMayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture He tweets mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomCatch up on all the latest Mumbai news crime news current affairs and also a complete guide on Mumbai from food to things to do and events across the city here Also download the new midday Android and iOS apps to get latest updates