By Saturday evening, the Congress had won 131 seats and was leading in five others, taking its tally to 136. This would be the highest since 1989, when the party had won 178 seats.
The Congress vote share also peaked at 42.9%, also the highest after 1989 when it had secured 43.76% of the polled votes.
In the 2018 Karnataka elections, the Congress had won 79 seats and its vote share was recorded at 38.04%, the highest among the parties in the fray that year.
While The Congress defeated the BJP by a huge margin in the results announced on Saturday, the saffron festival, however, managed to largely maintain its basegarnering 35.9% of the votes polled, slightly below the 36.22% recorded in 2018. But the BJP’s number of seats dropped dramatically: from 104 in 2018 to an expected 65 this time (in the evening, the BJP had won 61 seats and was leading in four others).
The BJP’s performance this time is much better than in the 2013 Assembly polls, when the party had won only 40 seats and got 19.89% of the votes polled.
The JD(S), the main regional force in the state, has been further decimated, as Saturday’s results show: its number of seats and vote share have declined. After winning 37 seats in 2018, the party this time saw its number of seats almost halved to 19, while its vote share dropped to 13.31%, from 18.36% five years ago.
The decline in JD(S) seats and vote share points to the state’s electoral landscape becoming bipolar. In the last 20 years, the JD(S) increased a significant share of the vote pie in successive elections, garnering 20.77%, 18.96%, 19.89% and 18.36% vote share, respectively, in 2004, 2008, 2013 and 2018. Polls in the assembly.
The Congress was a dominant force in Karnataka from 1957 to 1978, a period when the party’s vote share in Assembly elections hovered between approximately 44% and 52%, and the number of seats ranged from 126 to 126. 165. In the period between 1978 and 1989, the Congress position was challenged—first by the Janata Party and then by the Janata Dal—and state politics remained largely bipolar.
But after 1989, the emergence of the BJP and the formation of the JD(S) in 1999 played a crucial role in its politics, making the state’s electoral struggle triangular. That, if Saturday’s results are any indicator, could be changing.
