This is the story of one district, six seats and three parties.

Indeed, Rawalpindi had it all – the stronghold of PML-N; an onslaught by PTI with its stars; the electables it picked up and the clean unknowns that it launched.

It also had the PPP loyal vote bank in Pindi and a minister/prime minister who had spent lavishly on his own area.

The results provide a window into what happened on May 11.

For this six of the seven seats of the district have been analysed – from NA-51 to NA-56. Of these, three fall in Rawalpindi city and the other three include a mix of rural and urban areas.

The three urban seats are seen as a PML-N stronghold though one of them used to be Sheikh Rashid’s, who lost it in 2008 (he won it in 2002 as an independent candidate). Two of the mixed seats are Nisar Ali Khan’s home ground while one is Gujar city, which in 2002 and 2008 was won by former prime minister Raja Pervez Ashraf.

The voters who came out

First the brouhaha over the increased turnout.

The increased turnout was there but only on the purely urban seats did it cross ten per cent – NA 54, 55 and 56.

In 56 (where Imran Khan was contesting himself the increase from 2008 was 20 per cent) while in 55 and 54 (which had Sheikh Rashid – supported by PTI – and PTI’s Hina Manzoor) the increase was a hefty 15 per cent.

All three seats witnessed a tough contest between the PML-N on the one side and PTI and Rashid on the other.

On the other two seats, which are a mix of urban-rural areas, the hike in turnout was only present in NA-53 and NA-52. The last – NA-51 – that can for the moment be called Raja’s last stand, saw no change.

Interestingly in NA-53, which also had a PTI candidate (who defeated PML-N stalwart Nisar Ali Khan) witnessed an increased turnout of nine per cent while 52 where Khan did not face much of a contest from the PTI saw a simply five per cent increment. In NA-52, Khan won.

The conclusion that can be drawn can go both ways – the increased voter turnout is simply the result of PTI or PML-N’s new vote or that a tough competition compelled the candidates to mobilise higher numbers.

Where the PML-N lion was trounced by the bat

PTI’s victory is not simply due to the middle class turnout that everyone is going gaga over.

In these six seats, the PTI bagged two plus helped Sheikh Rashid win a third one. Of them two were the city seats of Rawalpindi – NA-55 and 56 - and one was the Taxila seat which is a mix of urban and rural – NA-53.

The one won by Imran Khan is the easiest to analyse.

The Khan’s charisma on NA-56 was the leading factor and the anecdotal evidence on polling day also suggested this.

But there was an additional factor here too which those who can keep an eye on politics in the garrison city point out – PML-N’s Hanif Abbasi was seen as a weak candidate.

He was not very popular among the PML-N workers. At the same time, his involvement in the ephedrine scandal is said to have weakened him. This is perhaps why – in the midst of an N sweep province wide where most party candidates saw increased support, his vote tally fell – from 2008.

He saw a drop in his vote bank - he got around 67,000 votes when in 2008 he had managed 73,433.

In fact, part of this argument also applies to the Sheikh Rashid seat – his opponent, PML-N’s Shakeel Awan in NA-55, is also not among the more popular of the N-parliamentarians. He too dropped his vote tally from 76,980 in 2008 to 75,275 in 2013.

The lesson here is that candidates matter – the party alone cannot win or lose an election.

Local influence helps

And this is lent further credence when the election of NA-53 is considered which was won by PTI.

Here the fight was between decades old rivals – and the politics was rather traditional too between two local boys who had made it big.

Nisar Ali Khan and Ghulam Sarwar Khan had battled it out on NA-53 in 1990, 1993, 2002 and 2008.

In 2002 Sarwar Khan won as an independent candidate and then joined the Q League. In 2008, he lost again but still managed to get slightly short of 50,000 votes to Nisar Ali Khan’s 72,257.

So this time around when he re-entered the fray on a PTI ticket, people thought he would ride the PTI wave to victory. Unlike the relatively unknown candidates of PTI at other places in the district, Sarwar Khan had solid support in his constituency (proven by his vote tally in the various elections he contested) and all he needed was some help from the party. And PTI’s support was there in this constituency, undoubtedly.

So on D-day when Nisar Ali Khan garnered 102,142 votes, Sarwar Khan managed to win 110,308 and beat the former.

The conclusion is obvious. The PTI has support – considerable in the more urban seats and a little less on mixed seats – this support when coupled with an electable candidate is effective against a traditional winner.

In fact, this logic of constituency politics is something the PTI needs to understand as well as analysts.

Elections are not won on the basis of the party or the candidate but a combination of the two.

Even if a party has a strong support base in a particular area or on a specific seat, the voters also need to believe in the candidate.

And an unknown and clean candidate can sometimes not win over the people the way an experienced candidate does.

This is why Ghulam Sarwar Khan won while the PTI candidate in NA-51, Farhat Faheem Bhatti only got 39,842 votes.

As social scientist Akbar Zaidi points out, research the world over shows that people do not vote for those who come from a similar background but those whom they think can help them.

Though Bhatti had worked hard to build the PTI in Gujar Khan, the fact that he had spent a significant part of his life aboard, put him at a disadvantage. (He gave up his dual nationality to contest the elections.)

But here another factor also needs to be mentioned to add some more detail – in NA (which Nisar Ali Khan retained) his runners up was PTI’s Ajmal Sabir Raja who just got 69,539 to Khan’s 132,905.

Raja’s better performance than Bhatti’s was perhaps due to the fact that the former had some experience of local politics.

But local residents say his short election campaign (he began campaigning three weeks before the election when he was awarded the ticket) prevented him from penetrating deep into the constituency.

This factor might just be a case of another weakness of the PTI campaign – the party spent far too much time first on the internal elections and then awarding tickets. For a new party, which probably did not have old hands in each constituency, this proved lethal.

The PPP’s debacle

This does not require much explanation.

That the PPP could not win a single seat from the district including that of former prime minister Raja Pervez Ashraf, which was seen to be relatively safe compared to other PPP wins from 2008, says it all.

But the numbers still reveal the full horror of the disaster that is probably province wide.

The PPP may never have done particularly well in Rawalpindi district but it had a small but stable vote bank on most seats as it did in Lahore.

This time around this small bank has virtually disappeared from the urban constituencies – the drop in its vote bank in NA-55 and 56 is around 80 per cent. In NA-54 where it had a (relatively) strong candidate, Zamurrad Khan, the drop is 60 per cent.

On the two mixed seats including the one where Ashraf broke all records of development work witnessed roughly the same drop as NA-51 (which did not produce a federal cabinet minister) – 20 per cent.

Not only does this show that development cannot and did not counter the anger of the voters over inflation and electricity and gas shortages, it also shows that the urban voters are far angrier than the rural voters (or those who come from rural- plus-urban constituencies).

But this leads to the next question, where did this vote go?

To the PML-N or the PTI?

Without more detailed results, it is difficult to tell but anecdotal evidence suggests that some of it went the N way.

At a polling station in Rawalpindi’s poorer area, women who were voting for PML-N said they were doing so because it gave them “sasti roti”.

The PML-N earlier populist tactics in Punjab, which analysts said were reminiscent of Bhutto, may just have helped the party in 2013.