Monday's election will also not be a clean sweep for the opposition. This phase also marks the end stretch of the Bengal poll season, when things move into purely Trinamool territory. The party has consistently done well here; in the 2011 assembly poll, it won 44 of these 49 constituencies. More importantly - and this is from where Mamata Banerjee's party will draw comfort and strength - it did not seem to lose any ground at all in the 2014 Lok Sabha poll, which happened after the Saradha scam; it retained almost every assembly segment and it seemed as if the average voter chose to just ignore the Saradha cacophony. Trinamool would be hoping there's an encore.
The opposition organisation is in a shambles at many places and this is a region where, barring a few pockets, almost the entire Congress vote has shifted body and soul to Trinamool (which means the Congress-Left alliance will have only a symbolic value in most of these 49 seats). Trinamool would also be putting its best foot forward because of the sheer number of heavyweights contesting from here, who include state finance minister Amit Mitra, who takes on his predecessor and fellow Presidency College alumnus, Asim Dasgupta.
The other big issues that have come to the forefront of this election - the ruling party's incoherent and, sometimes, blundering responses to the Narada tapes and the state administration's ongoing battle with the EC - may have less direct resonance specifically with the North 24-Parganas and the Howrah voters.
This phase - more than any other - may boil down to being a test of nerves and self-belief, where the voter and the EC-controlled administrative machinery will be as much a candidate as the politician asking for votes.
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