Bihar’s trust vote for NDA

Voters endorse Nitish Kumar, backed by the BJP. Grand Alliance, Lalu dynasty face political oblivion

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When an alliance’s two main constituents have a strike rate in excess of 80%, and it manages to get almost half of all votes polled (a vote share of 46.6%, 8.7percentage points higher than the opposing grouping’s), you get a result like the Bihar one, where the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) won (or was leading in, at 9:30 pm) 202 seats in the 243-member assembly.

Such was the scale of victory — no grouping or party has ever won 46.6% of the popular vote in the state before — that the NDA kept building on its lead as counting continued through the day, eventually crossing the 200-seat mark.

Such landslide wins — and Bihar is definitely one — are the result of the winning side picking an issue that resonates with the electorate, or simply doing something for it (such as a Big Bang populist scheme), or the losing side imploding, or both.

Bihar 2025 isa case of the third.