Telangana Assembly: TDP-Congress alliance to trounce TRS despite no big face to take on KCR, says CVoter survey

Editor’s Note: The following report is based on a continuous mood of voters survey conducted by CVoter once a week since August through telephonic interviews. The survey was not commissioned by Firstpost_._ The recent images of Chandrababu Naidu warmly greeting Rahul Gandhi may well become the defining ones as far as the Telangana Assembly Election is concerned. The Congress-TDP alliance is expected to trump the Telangana Rashtra Samithi to win the election, a survey by pollster CVoter has predicted. The alliance between the Congress, TDP and CPI, which was announced in September, has completely upturned political equations in the state. Earlier, TRS led by Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao was widely expected to clinch the battle. Now, with the formation of the Opposition alliance, Rao is in a spot of bother if CVoter’s analysis is anything to go by. The survey, conducted for ABP News and Republic TV predicted that the Congress-TDP alliance would win 64 seats, while the TRS would win 42 seats. In terms of vote share too, the alliance is comfortably ahead of the TRS, and the former is expected to garner 33.9 percent of the votes as against the latter’s 29.4 percent. The alliance is predicted to do well, despite it not having a big face to take on Rao. However, Rao remains most people’s preferred chief ministerial candidate, and 42.9 percent of respondents wanted him at the helm, with the next most popular chief ministerial candidate being K Jana Reddy of the Congress at 22.6 percent. However, CVoter’s analysis notes: “KCR is the most popular leaders in standalone and runoff style polling. However, the electoral arithmetic of TDP and INC is besting his party. Perhaps this is also a critical weakness of the TRS — standalone, it is unable to take on TDP and INC.” The survey has also predicted that the lead of the TDP-Congress alliance “may get strengthened owing to bandwagon effect that causes voters to switch to a side that is winning.” Further, while the BJP is predicted to win 4 seats, other candidates are expected to win in 9 places, according to the survey. The Telangana Assembly has a total of 119 seats. In the election conducted in 2014, the TRS had won with a massive mandate, and clinched 63 seats and reduced its nearest rival, the Congress, to 21 seats.