Behind the BJP's booth-level revival in Delhi

BJP bottomed out in 2015 and began its revival from 2020. But what aided its victory in Delhi polls was the city's non-poor deserting the AAP

- Abhishek Jha and Roshan Kishore

NEW DELHI: The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) lost power to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Delhi in the 2025 assembly elections after two back-to-back massive victories. The numbers underline the magnitude of the political shift in the national capital. The BJP had just three MLAs against AAP's 67 in the 2015 elections, whereas it now has 48 against the AAP's 22.

How did the BJP achieve this remarkable turnaround in Delhi? What went wrong for the AAP? While the headline vote share and seat share numbers tell us the basic story, they cannot do justice to the heterogeneities within the electoral landscape of Delhi.

It is to uncover these trends that HT set to analyse booth-level results of the 2025 Delhi elections and compare them with 2015 and 2020 data. These results, in keeping with Election Commission of India (ECI) guidelines were published in Form 20 data on February 13. In 2025, Delhi had a total of 13,766 polling booths across its 70 assembly constituencies (ACs) with an average of 686 votes per polling booth. Because the data was uploaded in a format which was not easily machine readable, a significant amount of time had to be invested in cleaning the data for any analysis.

Booth level data clearly shows that the AAP peaked in 2015 and the BJP has been gaining ground since 2020.

The AAP won almost three-fourth of Delhi's 12,177 polling booths in the 2015 assembly elections with a median victory margin of 30.1% of votes polled. This number came down to 64.4% and 25% respectively in the 2020 elections. The biggest beneficiary of fall in AAP's granular dominance between 2015 and 2020 was the BJP, which saw its share of booths won increase from 23.1% to 35%. Because the AAP still had the tailwinds of the first-past-the-post system — a 50% vote share at the state level can lead to disproportionately high seat share — behind it in 2020, it won 63 out of the 70 ACs in the elections.