A big win for the alliance, not the party alone
What happened
The party that topped the seat count in 2019 topped it again this year, though not on its own.
Bharatiya Janata Party won 132 seats — short of the 145-seat majority mark.
Its alliance, the Mahayuti — a group of parties that team up to fight an election together and share power afterward if they win enough seats between them — reached 235 seats instead.
What changed
Two new party names appeared among this year's seat winners for the first time.
SHS(UBT) and NCP(SP), both breakaway factions of established parties, won seats in Maharashtra for the first time this year.
The single biggest shift moved seats from the Indian National Congress to the BJP: 16 constituencies changed that way.
Notable numbers
A few numbers from the results stand out on their own.
The closest race: Malegaon Central, Maharashtra was decided by just 162 votes — the smallest margin, how far ahead the winner finished, in votes, over whoever came second, of any seat that year.
At the other extreme, Satara, Maharashtra was won by a margin of 64.6% of the vote — the widest of the election.
Turnout — the share of registered voters who actually cast a ballot — peaked in Karvir, Maharashtra, at 85.7%.
4,61,886 voters chose NOTA — "None of the Above," a ballot option letting them formally reject every candidate on offer — making up 0.7% of the vote statewide.
The backdrop
This election was the first since one of the state's oldest parties split into two rival factions.
In June 2022, a faction of Shiv Sena MLAs led by Eknath Shinde broke from the party; Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray resigned on 29 June 2022 and Shinde became Chief Minister. On 17 February 2023, the Election Commission of India awarded the Shiv Sena name and bow-and-arrow symbol to Shinde's faction; Thackeray's faction contested as Shiv Sena (UBT).