StatsGuru: Looking at the numbers behind Arvind Kejriwal's victory

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The Delhi assembly elections were widely considered among the more stunning results of any election in Indian history. The big story is shown in Table 1: A state that can deliver majorities, but not outsize ones, gave a historic landslide to the Aam Aadmi Party, or AAP. As Table 2 shows, the AAP won over half the votes in a multi-cornered contest, which ensured the seat-wise landslide. The Congress vote collapsed; but so did the steady vote-share of the Bahujan Samaj Party and of independents.

While the BJP vote share appears to have stayed steady overall, it conceals some big falls in individual constituency, as shown in Table 3. Clearly the story might be more complex than Congress voters simply moving to the AAP. Yet that narrative has a lot of truth to it. As Table 4 shows, for example, the seats where the AAP showed the biggest gains over 2013 featured many Muslim-dominated ones.

The exact size of the AAP landslide is visible in Table 5. The average margin of victory for the AAP candidate was over 22 per cent, more than three times the size of the margin in 2013. BJP lost seats by similar margins, shown in Table 6. But the degree of the Congress' humiliation is clear from Table 7 - the margins of defeat are truly stunning in 2015.