Capt Amarinder Singh to Kejriwal: Accept Defeat Gracefully, Cut out the Theatrics

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The excessive display of paranoia by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), right from its top leadership to the lowest cadres, has assumed ludicrous proportions and indicates the complete demoralization in the party in the face of imminent defeat in the recently concluded assembly elections, Punjab Congress President Captain Amarinder Singh said on Tuesday.

With AAP national convenor Arvind Kejriwal leading the way, every Tom, Dick and Harry in the party is running to the Election Commission (EC) with one or the other frivolous complaint, clear indicating that the party is preparing ground to save face following the declaration of the results, said the Congress chief ministerial candidate, in a hard-hitting statement issued here.

The Punjab Congress chief urged Kejriwal to accept his party’s defeat gracefully and not lower the dignity of prestigious institutions like the EC to cover up his own desperation.

Read full article: HERE

According to Congress, their internal pre poll survey points to around 70 seats as given above



Punjab: Voter Turnout Data Repudiates the Claim of an AAP Wave

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We are repeatedly told that higher voter turnout in both Punjab as a state and Malwa as a region would be a clear indication of an AAP Wave, however invisible. Now that the all the numbers are in, we find, at the overall state level and all the three regions of Punjab, including Malwa, voter turnout declined viz-a-viz 2012. Only 6 out of 22 districts (marked in yellow or green) voter turnout was found relatively higher this year than 2012, but only three (marked green)  – Pathakot, Fategarh Sahib & Mansa where the increase was somewhat statistically significant. 

Dr Prannoy Roy’s one sample Focus Group Discussion (FGD) on the basis of which he projected a 57.5% probability for AAP win was in an assembly constituency known as Bassi Pathana, part of Fategarh Sahib Lok Sabha constituency. The hard data conclusively establishes that extrapolating Bassi Pathana as a state wise trend as Dr Roy attempted flagrantly violates all established principles of research methodology. 

The analysis also explains why Congress war room distributed ladoos and wild celebrations broke out while AAP went into a sulk after voting completion.

Punjab Forecast: Prannoy Roy’s Nate Silver-Donald Trump Moment???

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When Dr Prannoy Roy switched from his usual votes, seats, shares and swing projections to dishing out probabilities, he was actually playing chicken à la Nate Silver of the website www.fivethirtyeight.com, an American statistician and writer who analyzes baseball and elections. He is the editor-in-chief of ESPN's FiveThirtyEight and a Special Correspondent for ABC. Silver is not merely a living icon in the US but the world over. But Silver still finally suffered his Waterloo moment with Trump’s victory.

Vote shares, seat shares, swings are measurable, reflecting a higher degree of certainty and thus lend themselves to public accountability. Probabilities are vastly different. Like Silver, Dr Roy too now can take the route to argue that his probability of AAP winning 57.5% (read here) theoretically is merely a forecast and not a prediction. The difference between the two terms is that essentially a forecast is not a certainty but just “an estimate of risk”. What is overlooked is that Dr Roy’s probability implicitly also gave AAP 43.5% chances of losing!! In short, whichever way the result went, a pollster who dishes out probabilities still can claim his forecast was spot on just as Silver continues to do so with his probabilities of the US Presidential elections last year. Never mind that millions of Nate followers took his numbers literally ended up feeling betrayed and deeply let down by their prophet! Trump’s victory also heralds the death of their prophet!

Then there is Michael Moore, internationally acclaimed documentary producer. Being a diehard Left liberal with a deep seated hatred for Donald Trump is a characteristic trait he shared with Nate Silver. But there the comparison ended. Right from the primaries when Nate dismissed Trump as a non viable candidate, Moore in contrast, even in the early days of the US primaries, warned the liberal movement of the dangers of the rise of Trump and campaigning for Left Liberal Bernie Sanders who he felt had the best prospects of trouncing Trump. But unlike Nate who used numbers, Moore relied on more qualitative interpretative arguments. It is easy to get carried away with numbers and as a result, the liberal movement preferred to embrace Silver’s forecasts with both hands and chose to dismissively ignore Moore who in hindsight is now widely accepted had been perceptibly right on target.

Today in India we have a choice. Either go for dazzling numbers dished out by the likes of Prannoy Roy, Yashwant Desmukh etc or go by the field reports of old time style journalism from the likes of Shivam Vij, Prashant Jha, Rohini Singh and so many like them who provide us interpretative answers and not so much solid but meaningless numbers. I have many times jokingly tweeted to Yashwant Deshmukh that I have not much faith in the numbers that his CVoter dishes out but have complete admiration for his more substantive analytical election related articles. This I suppose holds equally true for all truly psephology freaks, rather than numbers, go by the analytical reports of the likes of Yogendra Yadav, Sanjay Kumar and CSDS rather than seductive topline numbers of Today’s Chankaya, AC Nielson and their likes.

Provided below are extracts from an excellent article by Marlena Trafas in the Weekender on lessons learnt from the last US Presidential Elections 

While there are many explanations for how Trump got elected, two stands out in particular for how well they exemplify the failure of numbers to fully explain the complex world we live in. One explanation comes from resident Numbers Guy, Nate Silver, the founder and editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight, a site that “uses statistical analysis — hard numbers — to tell compelling stories about politics, sports, science, economics and culture.” The other explanation comes from liberal filmmaker and author, Michael Moore.

A week after the election, Silver appeared on The Daily Show and was interviewed by the host, Trevor Noah. The interview began a bit awkwardly as Noah says to Silver, “Let’s talk about polling. You’re not a pollster, you aggregate the polls. This entire race you were wrong.” To that Silver responds, “No,” and the entire audience erupts with laughter.

This audience response makes perfect sense, as it is now clear that all the predictions and forecasts and probabilities that expressed very little chance of Trump winning the presidency were wrong. Now, Silver wouldn’t say they were wrong. In fact, his entire interview with Noah is a defense of the polls he used, saying there’s “not an easy television explanation,” saying these were “some of the best polls,” and that his “forecasts” were actually not “predictions,” but “an estimate of risk.” He describes percentages and “if this, then this” explanations based on calculations, maintaining that if there were a 30 percent chance of rain, people may bring out their umbrellas, thereby suggesting that people should’ve been worried about the 30 percent chance of Trump being elected.

Despite Silver’s reasoning, many everyday people took his numbers to mean that Trump in fact had no chance of winning. Silver argues that people shouldn’t have thought that based on the numbers he provided. It’s this frustrating, circular, contradiction that leads to Noah’s exasperated ending joke, “I’m gonna choke you right now, Nate Silver.” If one watches the interview, it’s clear that all the smart talk Silver delivers never really feels like a true answer or explanation.

When compared with Moore’s “5 Reasons Trump Will Win,” Silver’s numbers become abstract and meaningless as they translate why Trump will win into zeroes and ones. Moore, unlike Silver, uses words — qualitative evidence — history and sociology to explain the human behavior and feelings that would lead to a Trump presidency.

Moore’s reasons range from “The Last Stand of The Angry White Man” to “The Depressed Sanders Vote,” and reading through them on his website makes it it hard to discount the fact that they make sense — definitely more sense than Silver’s mathematical explanation. Moore’s explanations are ones people seemingly only came to fully realize after the election. But Moore made his prediction in the summer of 2016. And very few people seemed to take him seriously. The days before the election I heard hopeful, confident talk of a Madam President, not wariness about the “Angry White Men” who would vote for Trump because they felt left behind by the current cultural-political moment.

Put simply, the guy who used numbers and data and stats incorrectly predicted the election and the guy who used words, history, and qualitative facts correctly predicted the election., Leading up to Nov. 9, many hopeful liberals put their faith in Silver’s numbers rather than Moore’s words to explain how humans would act that Tuesday. The numerical data was trusted and the numerical data let a lot of people down.

While there are many lessons to take away from the election of Donald Trump, one is that numbers can lie. Math and stats and data points don’t always tell it like it is. Sometimes you need interpretative answers rather than the “correct” answer. Sometimes the guy spouting words and using simple addition has a keener sense of the forces that govern our society than the one using statistical analysis.

Read the full article: Here



AAP's Greatest Fear: Match fixed by Cong & Akalis in Punjab

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After polling ended, the mood in the ruling SAD and BJP war rooms was sombre. But even the newbie Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) too did not exude the confidence it did before the polling day. This has surprised political pundits as post-poll calculations of many are still favouring AAP as the main player, though short of the majority mark of 59 seats. 

To win the war, the two traditional rivals may have even agreed to lose some prestige battles. A defeat from his citadel Lambi may not augur well for the CM nor for Sukhbir from Jalalabad. 

“Both the Congress and SAD-BJP know it would not be business as usual if AAP takes Punjab. As the two ruled Punjab alternately, the businesses of both Congress and SAD-BJP leaders have flourished. The AAP has also threatened to reopen corruption cases given a quiet burial by both Badal and Amarinder against each other,” Ashutosh Kumar, professor of political science at Panjab University, says.

The Dera Sacha Sauda, which had lifted SAD-BJP hopes in the last lap by announcing its support, could have caused a reverse swing on the penultimate day through word of mouth. Many believe the open declaration of support to SAD-BJP could be nothing more than “posturing”. 

The Dera vote to the SAD-BJP would have cut those of AAP and helped Congress indirectly. A direct support to the Congress, therefore, cannot be ruled out, party leaders say.

Read the full story: HERE

Punjab: Wipeout is BJP's Worst Fear as Congress raid its Hindu Votes.

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If reports of the Punjab BJP are to be believed, the party will lose ground in the state post Assembly elections. According to lists of expected winners prepared by BJP teams, the party is unlikely to retain its 12 seats that it had won in the 2012 elections. The BJP contested 23 segments.

Dinesh Babbu (Sujanpur) is the only consensus candidate as the expected winner on all lists. Field reports, including that of two former state party presidents, put the number of expected winners at not more than three, and predicted a close fight in six constituencies.
Party sources put the number of winners at six and said at least seven more were in reckoning to win.

Common names on the lists of possible winners are Som Parkash (Phagwara), Parveen Bansal (Ludhiana North), Anil Joshi (Amritsar North), Ashwani Sharma (Pathankot) and Tikshan Sud (Hoshiarpur).

Read full article: HERE

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