The BJP-led NDA and the LDF will have to draw up new strategies to unseat Shashi Tharoor of the UDF in the Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha constituency, predicts Manorama News-VMR Mood of the State survey.
While the LDF will have an increase in its votes, the BJP's votes are likely to dip by 1.38 per cent. The runner-up in the 2019 Parliament elections, the BJP, will have to sweat more to retain its second position, the survey said.
The NDA has fielded Union Minister of State Rajeev Chandrasekhar, while the LDF has nominated Panniyan Raveedran of the CPI to wrest the seat from Congress's Tharoor.
The survey predicted an increase of 2.81 per cent in the LDF's votes and a 1.07 per cent decrease in the UDF's votes.
While considering the vote share, the pre-poll survey foresaw the UDF to grab 40.07 per cent of the vote share, followed by the NDA with 29.88 per cent, and the LDF winning 28.37 per cent, 1.57 per cent less than the BJP-led alliance. The first phase of the pre-poll survey conducted in December had predicted a difference of 0.86 per cent in the vote shares of the NDA and the LDF.
The latest survey result has exposed the chinks in the LDF's campaign machinery.
Tharoor made the Thiruvananthapuram constituency his pocket borough ever since his first win in 2009 when he trounced his opponent by a margin of 99,998 votes. In 2014, the constituency witnessed a close triangular contest, and the Congress leader won by a reduced margin of 15,470 votes.
The sitting MP, Tharoor, defeated Kummanam Rajasekharan of the NDA by an impressive margin of 99,989 votes in 2019. C Divakaran of the CPI ended up in the third slot.
Though the constituency traditionally had been witnessing a contest between the Congress and the CPI, the BJP clawed its way to second place in 2014, which it retained in 2019.
The Manorama News-VMR pre-poll survey covered 28,000 people across all the Assembly segments in March. The survey looked at the possible results if the polling was then conducted. The Manorama News-VMR pre-poll survey, "Who will win in 20 seats" is the largest in terms of sample size.
