RK Nagar bypoll: Opinion poll puts TTV, with 35.4% of vote, ahead of DMK

When the RK Nagar bypoll campaign began last week, no one would have given rebel AIADMK leader and independent candidate T T V Dhinakaran a chance to garner more votes than

E Madhusudhanan

of the ruling AIADMK. A survey now has. An opinion poll conducted by

People Studies

, a multi-discipline research institute, has predicted

TTV

would emerge as the frontrunner for the highstakes bypoll, pushing the muchexpected DMK’s N

Marudhu Ganesh

to the second place and AIADMK’s

Madhusudhanan

to a distant third. Organisers of the opinion poll said the exercise was conducted on 156 streets so as to cover all polling booths in the assembly segment and the survey reached out to 3,120 voters between December 5 and 12.

As per the poll released on Wednesday by Prof S Rajanayagam, TTV is likely to poll 35.4% of the votes in the RK Nagar bypoll, which is scheduled on December 21. DMK candidate Marudhu Ganesh is expected to garner 25.9% of the votes, trailing TTV by almost 10%, it said. The opinion poll gives the AIADMK’s Madhusudhanan a

vote

share of just 20.6%.

The surveyors also asked the respondents who they would have voted for if the April bypoll was not aborted. On both these fronts, TTV scored better with a 38.2% and 43.5% percentage share, ahead of the DMK candidate’s 27% and 25.6% and Madhusudhanan’s 18.3% and 19%.

The ruling AIADMK is elated over retaining the ‘two leaves’ symbol and the survey also covered the relevance of election symbols ahead of the bypoll.

It found that voters have have become familiar the ‘pressure cooker’ symbol allotted to TTV, with 91.6% of voters correctly making the connection with the sidelined AIADMK leader; only 81.1% of voters, by comparison, connected the ‘two leaves’ symbol with Madhusudhanan and 77.8% the DMK’s ‘rising sun’ with Marudhu Ganesh.