Firstpost National Trust Survey: Modi most trusted leader with 52.8% mandate, 26.8% favour Rahul; development trumps caste

Narendra Modi and the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance hold a clear edge over the United Opposition Alliance or Mahagathbandhan as the race to the 2019 Lok Sabha Election enters its final lap. However, the actual selection of candidates by parties, the campaign messaging and political narrative has the potential to win the trust of the electorate and ultimately swing the election one way or another.

These are among the findings of the National Trust Survey conducted by Firspost and Ipsos.

The survey involved 34,470 individuals from 291 urban wards and 690 villages in 57 socio-cultural regions across 320 — over 60 percent — parliamentary constituencies, spread over 285 districts across 23 states of India.

Here's a look at the findings:

Methodology

The objective of the study was to ascertain local political situation and identify influencing trust factors at socio-cultural regions (SCR) and state level, segregated by urban and rural areas and coupled with some diagnostics on how and why people might vote in a certain way

- To meet above objective, adopted a sampling protocol that was best suitable to capture the heterogeneity of India's population base
- The sampling protocol was designed to provide estimate at socio-cultural region and state level, with 95 percent confidence interval and five percent margin of error (desired levels of precision).

The main requirements for this are:
- A comprehensive national sample frame at the most granular level possible (census enumerator blocks in urban and villages in rural) and random selection at every level of sample selection (ie district, ward/village, household, individual)
- The PPS (probability proportional to size) sampling procedure was adopted for selection of wards and villages in each SCR
- A total of 34,470 individuals were surveyed from 291 urban wards and 690 villages in 57 SCR covering 320 parliamentary constituencies, spreading in 285 districts across 23 states of India.
- Sample collected through survey was then weighted using 2011 national census data to correct for over- and undersampling of certain population sub-groups.