Keralam set for Flip Flop Election with thin margin?

This is the second of a three-part series by K Bharathram, political analyst and founder of Poll Pulse on Substack, which examines Kerala’s political landscape ahead of the Assembly elections, analysing the LDF’s bid for a third term, the UDF’s anti-incumbency push, and the NDA’s attempt to emerge as a third front.
Part 1: Kerala’s social diversity, roots of communism, and human development model | Click here
Part 2: Electoral history, alliances, and the trend of close, flip-flop contests.
Part 3: Region-wise dynamics and why central Kerala could decide the outcome.

We saw in the previous article how the first Communist government came about in Keralam in 1957 and how it was dismissed by the Centre in 1959. In the elections that followed in 1960, a broad coalition comprising the Congress (INC), Praja Socialist Party, Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) came to power and lasted its full term. After a hung verdict in 1965, the communists stormed back to power in 1967. Internal dissensions led to its implosion in 1969, but it managed to return to power in 1970. Keralam has had alternating governments from the CPIM led Left Democratic Front (LDF) and INC led United Democratic Front (UDF) in the 1977-2016 timeframe. The LDF government upended this flip flop pattern by retaining power in 2021 and approaches the upcoming election after being in power for 10 years.

I see the following common facets in Keralam Assembly elections

A Alliances: Elections in Kerala are fought among alliances. Given the diverse demography of the state, both the LDF and UDF alliances have assembled rainbow coalitions that maximise their appeal across regional groups, class, caste and religion. A cursory glance of parties in both coalitions reveals that the word Congress is repeatedly seen in the LDF coalition and similarly, words like Marxist, Communist and Revolutionary are seen in the UDF camp. This suggests that political opportunism rather than core ideology underpins alliance formation, at least as far as smaller parties are concerned. If anything, LDF is seen a more “Hindu” party than the Congress.

The NDA is another entrant in this usually bipolar race in Keralam. The BJP has been steadily increasing its vote share through organic growth and has in place a long standing alliance with the BDJS. More recently, the Twenty20 party that has pockets of support in Ernakulam district has joined the NDA. The NDA will hope that they can increase their vote share further and possibility even convert this into seats in 2026.

Flip flop pattern
As already highlighted, Kerala assembly elections have followed a flip flop pattern between the UDF and LDF from 1977-2016, and this trend was broken in 2021 when the LDF managed to retain power. This pattern suggests that anti-incumbency sentiment is generally the norm in Kerala, placing the incumbent at a disadvantage.

Close elections
And so, Keralam assembly elections have typically been tightly fought contests. As chart below shows, in five of the last nine assembly elections have been decided by a tiny vote share margin of ~2%, while in the remaining four, the margin was larger, close to 5%. Interestingly, whenever the UDF has won in the last 44 years, it has usually been by a small margin (1982, 1991 and 2011 were all close) and the only time they won convincingly (with a ~5% margin), was in 2001, when the UDF set factionalism aside and fought unitedly.

If history is therefore any indication, then a change of guard is likely and the UDF is likely to win by a small margin.

Local Body Election results do matter, but not as much as one may think
Elections for local bodies in Kerala were held in December, barely 4 months before the assembly elections. The UDF won convincingly in all tiers of local bodies, as table below shows:

However, when one studies vote share patterns from these polls as below, we observe that the LDF loss in vote share has primarily been captured by ‘Others’ (and not UDF).

This suggests that the swing away from LDF may be temporary and driven by local factors and may not reflect systemic anti-incumbency against the LDF (a one-to-one transfer of vote share from LDF to UDF should have happened if this were the case). An analysis of local body polls vs assembly election vote share in the previous election cycle confirms this trend and suggests that the CPIM enjoyed a rebound of nearly 5.2% from the local body election to the assembly election.

If the same trend holds true, then the winning margin of 5.3% for UDF in the 2025 local body election is likely to shrink to less than 2% in the assembly election (I am applying a net rebound factor of 3.6% from above table). This reinforces the trend I mentioned earlier that when UDF wins, the win margin is modest in most cases.

Conclusion
The history of Keralam assembly elections over the last 45 years suggests that these are mostly close contests where the winning margin is only about 2%. Notably, whenever the UDF has come to power, it has enjoyed a win margin of about 2% in three out of the four occasions it has come to power in the last 45 years.