A newly formed party won power in the state for the first time it contested an election.

The Biju Janata Dal won 68 seats, short of a majority on its own.

It governed together with the Bharatiya Janata Party through an alliance — a group of parties that team up to fight an election together, and share power afterward if they win enough seats between them.

This was a change of government, and the party that won hadn't existed at the previous election.

The clearest sign of that shift showed up in how seats moved: the single largest flow ran from the Janata Dal to the BJD.

That flow alone accounted for 34 of the 147 seats compared that year.

A few numbers from the results stand out.

The closest race was Bhadrak, Odisha, decided by a margin — how far ahead the winner finished, in votes, over whoever came second — of just 532 votes.

At the other extreme, Baramba, Odisha was won by the widest margin of the election, 69.5% of the vote separating the top two candidates.

The largest electorate was in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, where 3,58,751 voters were registered.

Turnout — the share of registered voters who actually cast a ballot — came to 58.4%, a change of -13.2 pp from the election before.

The party that won this election had been founded only a few years earlier by a leader carrying his late father's political legacy forward.

Beyond the top two finishers, a wide mix of smaller parties and independents also picked up seats that year.

In all, 9 parties won seats, alongside 8 independents.