In 2019, BJP won 224 of 303 seats with 50%-plus votes; for INDIA, this number was 54

AS THE BJP hopes to retain its dominance in the Lok Sabha results Tuesday, one crucial detail will be if it can match the performance of 2019, when it won 224 of its 303 seats (nearly two-thirds) with more than 50% of the vote share.

Of these seats, the BJP got more than 70% of the vote share in seven seats, between 60% and 70% in 77 seats, and between 50% and 60% in another 140 seats.

The highest vote share was recorded in Gujarat’s Surat, where Darshana Jardosh got 74.47% of the vote share. Notably, the Surat seat was won uncontested this time after the Congress candidate’s nomination papers were rejected and the other candidates withdrew.

A significant chunk of the BJP’s wins with greater than 50% of the vote share came in states where the party is a dominant force and where its main rival was the Congress. Of the total 224 50%-plus vote share wins, 40 came in Uttar Pradesh, which has a total 80 seats. In its clean sweep of Gujarat, the party won all 26 seats with more than 50% of the vote share. In Delhi, too, it won all seven seats with at least 50% vote share. The other states it swept with more than 50% vote share in each seat were Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Arunachal Pradesh.

In Rajasthan, the BJP won 23 of the state’s 25 seats (it won all), with more than 50% of the vote share. In Haryana, all of whose 10 seats were won by the party, the BJP got nine by a similar margin. In Madhya Pradesh, where it won 28 of 29 seats, it won 25 with more than half the votes. In Karnataka, where it was as dominant with 25 wins from a total of 28 seats, it won 22 seats with 50%-plus votes.

The other states where it won seats with upwards of half the vote share include Jharkhand (eight of 14 total seats), Chhattisgarh (six of 11), Assam (seven of 14), Goa (one of two), Tripura (one of two), Jammu and Kashmir (two of five), Bihar (14 of 40), Maharashtra (15 of 48), West Bengal (five of 42) and Punjab (one of 13).

Other parties, including BJP allies, together won 117 seats with more than 50% vote share. Among them, the parties with the most such seats were the DMK (19 seats), Congress (18), YSRCP (13), JD(U) (11) and the united Shiv Sena (10).

The Opposition INDIA bloc parties together won 54 seats with more than 50% vote share and other unaligned parties won 42 such seats. Together, the non-BJP, non-NDA parties won a total 84 seats with more than 50% vote share (excluding the NCP and Shiv Sena, which were undivided in 2019).

Across all parties, there were 186 seats where the winning margin was less than 10% of the overall vote share in the seat. In 97 of these seats, the winning margin was less than 5% of the vote share.

Last time, the BJP won 83 seats with less than 10% of the vote share separating the party from the runner-up. These seats include 41 where the winning margin was less than 5% of the overall vote share.

The other parties that won the most seats by less than 10%-vote share margin included the Congress (31 seats), the TMC (11), YSRCP (9), BJD (7) and BSP (6).

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