151 Seats and 11 Seats: Lessons from Winning and Losing Elections

On 23 May 2019, YSRCP won 151 of the 175 seats in the Andhra Pradesh Assembly with nearly half the vote. On 4 June 2024, it won 11, with 39.37% of the vote, while the alliance of the TDP, Jana Sena and the BJP won 164.

I worked on both campaigns. It would be easy to write only about the first. I think the second deserves equal honesty, because losing teaches what winning hides.

What the numbers say

The first lesson is arithmetic. A party with close to 40% of the vote is not a party that people abandoned. It is a party that lost a two-way contest under first-past-the-post voting. In 2019 the opposition vote was split. In 2024 it was consolidated into an alliance. The same voting system that turns 50% into 151 seats can turn 40% into 11. Anyone who plans campaigns needs to understand that seats are won constituency by constituency, not statewide.

What I take from 2019

• Long campaigns build trust. The padayatra ran for 14 months. Trust is built by showing up again and again, not by a burst at the end.
• Listening shapes the message. The most effective messages were the ones people had already said to us on the road.
• Many hands. No consultant, leader or volunteer network did it alone.

What I take from 2024

I will not offer a full political analysis of why the result went the way it did. That is for voters and for analysts from all sides. Some lessons are clear from the execution side, though.

• Crowds are not votes. The Siddham meetings drew enormous reported crowds. Energy at a venue is not the same as a decision at a polling booth, and campaign teams, including mine, must not confuse the two.
• Feedback must reach decisions. Door-to-door programmes collect huge amounts of information. That only matters if it changes something.
• Coalitions change the map. Strategy that worked against a divided field has to be rethought when the field unites.
• Incumbency is its own campaign. Asking for trust a second time is different from asking for it the first time. People judge delivery, not promises.

Respecting the verdict

The people of Andhra Pradesh gave a clear mandate in 2019 and a clear mandate in 2024. Both deserve respect. I wish the government they chose success in serving them, because the state's success matters more than any party's.

Politics as responsibility

I keep returning to one sentence: politics is not a game of power. It is a responsibility. Winning gives you the responsibility to deliver. Losing gives you the responsibility to listen, learn and serve as a constructive opposition. Campaigns are where that responsibility begins. They are not where it ends.

These years taught me more about people, organisation and trust than anything else I have done. I now apply those lessons in business, and I remain grateful to every volunteer, colleague and citizen I met along the way.