YSRCP wiped out in 8 of 13 Andhra districts
The YSR Congress Party (YSRCP), led by outgoing chief minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy, has drawn a blank in as many as eight out of 13 erstwhile combined districts of Andhra Pradesh in the recent state assembly elections.
The YSR Congress Party (YSRCP), led by outgoing chief minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy, has drawn a blank in as many as eight out of 13 erstwhile combined districts of Andhra Pradesh in the recent state assembly elections.
The YSRCP, which had won 151 out of 175 assembly seats during the 2019 state assembly elections, put up a disastrous show in 2024, winning just 11 assembly seats, while the Telugu Desam Party (TDP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) wrested the remaining 164 seats.
The YSRCP did not win even a single seat in Srikakulam, Vizianagaram, East Godavari, West Godavari, Krishna, Guntur, Nellore and Anantapur districts, while securing negligible number of seats in Visakhapatnam, Prakasam, Chittoor, Kurnool and Kadapa.
The party won two seats in the tribal constituencies of Araku Valley and Paderu assembly constituencies in Visakhapatnam, Yerragondapalem and Darsi in Prakasam, Mantralayam and Alur in Kurnool, Badwel, Rajampet and Pulivendula in Kadapa, and Tamballapalle and Punganur in Chittoor district.
The north coastal districts of Visakhapatnam, Vizianagaram and Srikakulam account for 34 MLA seats. In 2019, the YSRCP won 28 seats, restricting the TDP to only six seats, in these three districts. Of these six seats, the TDP won four seats only in Visakhapatnam. This time, the TDP won 32 out of 34 seats in the three districts, leaving only two seats to the YSRCP.
On the other hand, Rayalaseema has been a YSRCP bastion following the state’s split into Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in 2014. In the 2019 elections, the party won 49 out of 52 assembly seats in this region, leaving only three seats to TDP: N Chandrababu Naidu from Chittoor, and Nandamuri Balakrishna and P Kesav from Anantapur.
But this time, the TDP swept the entire region, winning 45 out of 52 assembly seats, leaving the YSRCP with just seven seats. YSRCP winners from the region include Jagan Mohan Reddy and his cabinet colleague P Ramachandra Reddy.
In central and south coastal Andhra, which account for 55 assembly seats, the TDP could win only 14 seats in 2019 and the remaining 41 went into the YSRCP’s kitty. In the recent elections, TDP won 53 assembly seats, leaving only two seats in Prakasam to the YSRCP.
“A silent anti-incumbency wave swept across all the three regions of Andhra Pradesh. There was a massive shift even in the traditional vote bank of the YSRCP, comprising Muslims, Christians and Dalits, to the TDP-led NDA in these districts,” observed V Ramanamurthy, a senior journalist of a vernacular daily from Visakhapatnam.
The vote share of the YSRCP, which was 50.6% in 2019, fell sharply to 39.37% in the 2024 assembly elections. The vote share of the TDP, which was 39.7% in 2019, went up to 45.6% this time. Taking the vote share of the BJP and the Jana Sena into account, the NDA secured 55.38% of votes in the present elections.
Interestingly, the YSRCP’s vote share was higher than that of the TDP in the Lok Sabha polls. The TDP polled 37.79% votes and won 16 MP seats, whereas the YSRCP’s vote share was 39.61% , bagging four seats.
The BJP polled 11.28% in Lok Sabha polls and won 3 MP seats, where as Jana Sena, which secured 4.36% votes, won two MP seats. The combined vote share of the alliance was 53.43 per cent, about two per cent lower than the vote share it secured in the assembly polls.