Kolkata, April 29: Poll Diary has released what is arguably the most dramatic exit poll projection of the evening for the West Bengal Assembly Elections 2026, predicting the BJP will win between 142 and 171 seats with a commanding 45.87% vote share — while the Trinamool Congress is projected to collapse to between 99 and 127 seats, its lowest ever tally in a state assembly election, with just 40.32% vote share.
The Poll Diary numbers are the most punishing for the TMC of any agency that has published projections tonight. At the lower end of the range — 99 seats — the Trinamool Congress would fail to even reach triple figures, an outcome that would represent a catastrophic collapse for a party that won 216 seats in 2021 and has governed West Bengal without interruption since 2011. Even at the upper end of 127 seats, TMC would be reduced to a distant opposition, well short of the 148-seat majority mark.
The vote share differential in Poll Diary’s projection is also the starkest of all agencies — BJP at 45.87% against TMC’s 40.32%, a gap of 5.55 percentage points. In a first-past-the-post system across 294 constituencies, a vote share lead of that magnitude, if evenly distributed, would translate into a seat advantage far exceeding the projected range, suggesting Poll Diary’s seat estimates may actually be conservative relative to their own vote share data.
The Indian National Congress is projected at just 3 to 5 seats with 4.59% vote share, confirming its near-total marginalisation in Bengal’s binary contest. The Left Front — which once ruled West Bengal for 34 uninterrupted years — is projected at a historic low of just 2 to 3 seats with 7.47% vote share, a figure that underlines the complete decimation of the left’s organisational base in the state over the past decade. Others are expected to account for 0 to 1 seat.
Placing Poll Diary’s numbers alongside the other agencies that have now reported, the emerging consensus picture for West Bengal 2026 is as follows: P-MARQ projects BJP at 150-175 and TMC at 118-138. Praja projects BJP at 178-208. IANS-Matrize projects BJP at 146-161 and TMC at 125-140. Poll Diary projects BJP at 142-171 and TMC at 99-127. Across all four agencies, not one has projected a TMC majority or a hung assembly. The BJP’s projected seat range across agencies runs from a floor of 142 to a ceiling of 208, with every single estimate placing the party at or above the majority mark of 148 at its midpoint.
The scale of TMC’s projected collapse in Poll Diary’s numbers would have consequences far beyond West Bengal. Mamata Banerjee’s national political relevance, her party’s footprint in Lok Sabha, and the broader opposition architecture in India would all be fundamentally altered by a result of this magnitude. For the BJP, a Bengal win of the scale Poll Diary projects would complete its dominance over every major Hindi heartland and eastern Indian state, leaving the opposition without a single large-state government outside the south.
As with all exit polls, these projections carry a margin of error and must be read against the historical context of West Bengal, where in 2021 every agency overestimated BJP by an average of 49 seats and underestimated TMC by 61. Whether 2026 represents a genuine rupture from that pattern — or another polling industry humiliation — will be answered on May 2.