Modi to get hat-trick, Keshubhai won't spoil his show: polls

Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi will celebrate Diwali again on 20 December, the day of counting, as he predicted. Modi's bete noire and Gujarat Parivartan Party chief Keshubhai Patel will disappear into political oblivion. And the Congress will have to wait another five years to reclaim the power corridors of Gandhinagar. This is the sense one gets from the two opinion polls conducted by Centre for Voting Opinion and Trends in Election Research (CVoter) and LensOnNews (Read the complete LensOnNews report here).The LensOnNews opinion poll gave a clear majority to the BJP predicting victory in 122 seats out of the total 182-member Assembly. The CVoter opinion poll reached similar results giving the BJP a tally of 120 seats. In terms of percentage, the LensOnNews study gave the BJP 46 percent against 36 percent for the Congress while the CVoter surveyclaimed 48 percent to the BJP against 38 percent to the Congress.[caption id="attachment_554894" align="alignleft" width="380"] Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. PTI[/caption]The GPP, however, failed to be a factor in both the research studies. The LensOnNews opinion poll predicted a mere six percent of votes for Keshubhai's party while the CVoter merely clubbed GPP with the others that are set to get 14 percent.According to the report by LensOnNews, the Keshubhai Patel-founded party despite big support from the Leuva Patel caste, will not make any difference to the BJP. The report said that the exodus of Leuva Patels was noticed only in Saurashtra but people from the community in central and south Gujarat remained loyal to the saffron party. It said that Keshubhai, however, will win the Visavadar seat albeit with covert support from the Congress.The continuous tide towards Modi has been attributed by LensOnNews towards a spineless campaign by the Congress, which focussed more on criticising the state government rather than giving anything from its side to the electorate. The opinion poll also predicted defeat for Leader of Opposition in the Gujarat Assembly Shaktisinhh Gohil and a close fight for Gujarat Pradesh Congress Committee president Arjun Modhwadia.Going by voter behaviour, the LensOnNews study said that if women come out to vote in large numbers, the chief minister will get even more votes given his popularity among women.The LensOnNews opinion poll was conducted between 28 November and 8 December among 12,078 voters with an error margin of three percent. The CVoter sample size was of 3,196 and the margin of error is 3.5 percent. Both the opinion polls covered the entire 182 Assembly seats of the state.