It seems like.
They decided to extrapolate based on one data point – Tejaswini Sriramesh beating Deve Gowda – or there might be another which I can’t recall right now and they came to the wonderful conclusion that the Deve Gowda family will get defeated when faced with women candidates. They even got an astrologer to endorse it. And put up two hapless inexperienced women to take on the ghataanughatis? that are Deve Gowda’s sons.
In vaguely unrelated stuff, I wonder if the results of the elections would have been any different had the order of polling been reversed. The main concern for most voters this time round was a stable single-party government – having learned the lessons from two horrible coalitions in the last four years.
Now, considering the BJP’s performance in North Karnataka, and assuming that the exit polls didn’t do too badly, people in the south and center would’ve realized that voting for the BJP would give them the best chance of producing a stable government. And the BJP would’ve won comfortably, without having to bother about haggling with independents.
And also it seems like the Congress and JDS will try and hijack the independent MLAs and somehow cobble together a slim majority. It’ll be a great tragedy if that happens – especially given that we’ve seen how these two parties have worked together before. As it stands out, I expect the BJP to buy out the three MLAs it needs to form a government.