How India voted: National Election Study 2014

Some conclusions culled from the survey:

Modi’s candidature helped NDA: 1 in every 4 respondents who voted for NDA said they would not
have voted for the coalition had Modi not been the prime ministerial
candidate
It was the upper castes, OBCs, and the tribals-who together won the day for BJP
Upper Caste consolidation in favor of BJP reached 1998 level, while Muslim vote share for Congress remained steady
BJP recorded her largest ever Muslim voteshare but by and large, Congress and the rest retained their Muslim Voters
Highest ever Young Voter Turnout: Compared to the national average of 66.6%, turnout among first-time voters (18-22 years) and ‘other young voters’ was 68 %. In past, the turnout among young voters has always been lower compared to the average national turnout. So this is a big deal. The increase in turnout among first-time voters was visible in both rural and urban constituencies and cut across gender.
In the BJP win states, Support for the party cuts across young and old: The biggest shift among first-time voters in favour of the BJP could be
seen in Madhya Pradesh followed by Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand and
Rajasthan. But, in other States where the party registered an impressive
victory — Bihar, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Chhattisgarh —
it received more support among voters of the age group 23-25 and among
other middle-aged voters compared to first-time voters
A thin ‘majority’ mandate: Before 2014 elections, the lowest vote share of a “majority” party was
41 % . Compared to that, BJP’s share of 31 per cent is pretty low.

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Razib Khan is a Bangladeshi-American geneticist and writer. He is co-founder of Brown Pundits and runs Unsupervised Learning, a Substack on population genetics, evolution, history, and politics with more than 55,000 subscribers, alongside the accompanying podcast. He has blogged at Gene Expression since the early 2000s. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Review, Slate, India Today, Quillette, and UnHerd. He is Director of Operations at FUTO in Austin, Texas, and co-founder of GenRAIT, a life-sciences platform company. Earlier in his career he developed ancestry algorithms for Gene by Gene, the Genographic Project, and Insitome, and was among the first employees at Embark Veterinary. Born in Dhaka and raised in upstate New York and eastern Oregon, he holds degrees in biochemistry (2000) and biology (2006) from the University of Oregon, and undertook doctoral work in genomics and genetics at UC Davis. He lives in Austin. View all posts by Brown Pundits Archive