Rajinikanth's plunge may catapult Stalin to CM job: Opinion poll

CHENNAI: Just 15 days after actor Rajinikanth announced his decision to launch a political party and contest all the assembly seats in the election scheduled for 2021, an opinion poll gave his yet-to-be-named party 33 seats in the 234-member assembly. The poll conducted by India Today-Karvy - the results of which were telecast on Tuesday evening -predicted that the superstar's party will get 16% votes in the event of a mid-term poll today.

The advantage is for DMK. The Dravidian major, which has been carrying the opposition cross in the state since May 2011, will bag 130 seats along with its allies, said the survey. It will get 34% of the popular vote, more than double of what Rajinikanth's party is likely to get. Despite being projected as the front-runner, DMK and its allies may lose 4% of the votes that they got in the May 2016 assembly poll, in which they won 98 seats.

AIADMK biggest loser if polls held now: Survey


The biggest loser could be the ruling AIADMK, which without the charismatic J Jayalalithaa at the helm, will get only 68 seats, a loss of 67 seats from the 2016 assembly poll tally, said the survey. In terms of popular votes, it will get 26% if elections are to be held now, a loss of 15% from the 2016 haul of 41% vote share, it added.

On the question of the most suitable to become chief minister, DMK working president M K Stalin got 50% nod, followed by Rajinikanth at a distant second with 17% popular support. While deputy chief minister O Panneerselvam got 11% support for the chief minister’s chair, the incumbent Edappadi K Palaniswami received a mere 5% support for the top post.

Interestingly, only 4% of people want actor Kamal Haasan to be the chief minister, the rebel AIADMK leader T T V Dhinakaran, who trounced both the ruling AIADMK and the opposition DMK in the recent R K Nagar bypoll, a mere 3% support for the top post.

In the last assembly poll, when Jayalalithaa was alive, the difference of vote share between the DMK and the AIADMK was wafer thin. The difference in vote share has now increased in favour of DMK due to the failure of the incumbent government, DMK spokesman and party Rajya Sabha MP, T K S Elangovan told a news channel.

“We don’t want to give much importance to such opinion polls,” a senior AIADMK leader and party spokesman told TOI. “I don’t believe in this opinion poll, since it is still very early and it does not reflect the ground reality. It is too early to predict an outcome,” said political analyst and journalist Sudhangan.