In the past five years, the MVA and the Mahayuti have governed Maharashtra for two-and-a-half years each. In this context, how people evaluated the performance of the two alliances in running the government may have influenced the electoral outcome.
More people believed that the Eknath Shinde-led Mahayuti government was better than the Uddhav Thackeray-led MVA government. The higher positive rating for the Mahayuti government appeared to cut across demographic, regional, and economic divides. Even so, its popularity was higher among young and old voters. Compared with male voters, women were more likely to appreciate the work done by the Mahayuti government (a difference of 12% points, as shown in Table 1).
The two alliances fared equally among urban voters. But among rural voters, the Mahayuti was much more popular (43% versus 29%). Similarly, the Mahayuti fared much better than the MVA across Maharashtra’s socio-economically differentiated regions. With the notable exception of the Konkan region, the MVA fell way behind the Mahayuti in popularity in other regions. The Mahayuti did really well in Vidarbha and Mumbai-Thane. It also did better than the MVA in the Marathwada and North Maharashtra regions.
The Mahayuti had a significant edge over the MVA among those occupying the bottom and middle rungs of the economic structure. Interestingly, the MVA was more popular than the Mahayuti among the rich despite its concerted efforts of reaching out to the poor in particular.
We can therefore conclude that the Mahayuti managed to significantly improve its image on the governance front and reach out to voters across the socio-spatial spectrum. The Mahayuti’s broad-based popularity seems to have helped it handsomely in the Assembly polls.
Sanjeer Alam is Associate Professor at Lokniti-CSDS
Published - November 25, 2024 07:56 am IST
