A landslide victory
What happened
Bharatiya Janata Party won this election decisively.
BJP won 163 of the 230 seats, a landslide supermajority of the assembly.
The Indian National Congress trailed far behind with 66 seats.
That was 54 more seats than the same party had won at the previous election.
What changed
The closest challenger's vote share — the slice of all ballots cast that went to one party or candidate — barely moved.
Its vote share was 40.4%, a change of just -0.5 pp from before.
Even so, INC won only 66 seats this time.
The single biggest shift ran from the INC to the BJP, with 70 seats moving that way.
Notable numbers
A few numbers from the results stand out.
Turnout — the share of registered voters who actually cast a ballot — reached 77.7%, the highest the state had ever recorded.
The tightest race was Shajapur, Madhya Pradesh, decided by a margin — how far ahead the winner finished, in votes, over whoever came second — of just 28 votes.
The widest margin of the night was in Indore-2, Madhya Pradesh, where the winner finished 45.3% of the vote clear of the runner-up.
The most crowded contest was Ater, Madhya Pradesh, where 38 candidates stood for the same seat.
The backdrop
This was BJP's first time facing voters since it returned to power before the previous term ended.
In March 2020, Congress leader Jyotiraditya Scindia resigned from the party and 22 Congress MLAs defected, mostly to the BJP. Chief Minister Kamal Nath, whose Congress-led government had governed since December 2018, resigned on 20 March 2020, and Shivraj Singh Chouhan was sworn in as chief minister on 23 March 2020.