How much does it help to replace a sitting candidate? This is the question leaders of several parties have been asking themselves, as candidate selection in various parties for the assemby elections have already started. The thinking on what to do in the Lok Sabha elections has already begun.
It cuts both ways. If a candidate is unpopular and hasn't worked in his constituency or he is supported only by a faction in the party, it makes sense to replace him. On the other hand, how do you neutralise his nuisance value, and the inevitability of him becoming a rebel, who will sabotage the party's chances?
There is also the other question of the margin of defeat. Your party candidate was defeated by a margin of under 5000 votes. Should you field him again (on the basis of the fact that a margin of 5000 is really small in an assembly constituency), especially when your party might have been routed in the previous election (like the Congress in Madhya Pradesh in 2008 which lost 33 seats by a margin of under 5000 votes).
It's a tough call. To fight incumbency, the turnaround figure is usually 40%. If you replace around 40% of the candidates, it can convey the message that while people might choose the same party a second time around, the people they will be electing will be different. In such a situation if the party chief in the state and the Chief Minister are at odds, the plot can be lost.
This is the question the Congress is grappling with in Rajasthan. Traditionally Rajasthan votes for the opposition, usually with a thumping majority, in both the assembly and the Lok Sabha. The general sense is that this time, the Ashok Gehlot government could overturn history if – and only if – he changes most of the sitting MLAs. So it is the Congress that wins, not the MLAs. This is leveraging the fact that many of Gehlot's schemes are a runaway success in rural Rajasthan.
But if you deny a sitting MLA a ticket, what grounds do you use? How do you tell a representative of the people that he will be booed out of the constituency if he is fielded again?
In 2008, the BJP in Chhattisgarh changed 18 out of 53 sitting MLAs and formed a government. But in Rajasthan, which had a BJP government, the party replaced 61 out of 120 MLAs – and still lost. In Madhya Pradesh the party replaced 61 MLAs out of 173 and won. But in the 2012 assembly elections in UP, Mayawati replace 122 out of 206 sitting MLAs and still lost the election.
Some general principles need to derived from this data. But it is an interesting electoral statistic problem. How much ticket denial is optimal ticket denail, the ultimate goal being forming the government?
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