Seventy assembly constituencies (ACs) in Delhi will go to polls on February 8, the Election Commission of India (ECI) announced Monday.
Although there are three main political parties in the fray, the contest will be between the incumbent Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which won 67 out of 70 seats in the 2015 elections, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which controls all three Municipal Corporations in the national capital and also won all seven seats from the state in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
The Congress, which ruled Delhi for three consecutive terms until 2013, drew a blank in both Lok Sabha and state elections since.
Two factors will determine Delhi’s political outcome.
The first is whether the electorate will make a distinction between voting for a central government and a state government. It did so in the 2015 assembly elections, and the BJP was reduced to winning three ACs within months of leading in 60 ACs in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. A CSDS-Lokniti poll conducted during the 2019 Lok Sabha elections showed that the BJP is much more vulnerable than the AAP on this count.
While 82% of the respondents who were voting AAP would have voted for the same party in the event of a snap assembly poll, this number was just 56% and 57% for the BJP and the Congress. 
Indeed, a sharp drop in BJP’s vote share is what one has seen in all assembly elections — Maharashtra, Haryana and Jharkhand, after the 2019 polls.
The other key factor will be how the Congress performs in these elections. In the two Lok Sabha and assembly elections held between 2013 and 2019, the AAP’s fortunes have depended to a large extent on Congress performance. While a complete collapse in Congress votes, like in the 2015 assembly elections, has led to an AAP sweep, Congress vote share reaching double digits has given BJP a big edge in a triangular contest. 
In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, both Scheduled Caste and Muslim votes, the only two communities which did not vote for the BJP in a majority, were divided between the AAP and the Congress. 
Whether the AAP can win back votes both from the BJP and the Congress will determine if it can get re-elected to govern Delhi when the results are declared on 11 February.
