A new party edges ahead, short of a majority
What happened
A new party took the lead in the state assembly, narrowly ahead of its closest rival.
Nationalist Congress Party won 71 seats, just ahead of the Indian National Congress's 69.
That left it short of the 145-seat majority mark on its own.
Even so, the INC took a bigger slice of the vote, 21.1% against the NCP's 18.8%.
What changed
A close finish at the top masked a lot of movement underneath, at the constituency level.
The single biggest shift moved seats from the Shiv Sena to the NCP: 20 constituencies changed that way.
A new party also won its first seats in the assembly this year: JSS.
Turnout — the share of registered voters who actually cast a ballot — also recovered, rising by +5.6 pp from the previous election.
Notable numbers
A few numbers from the results stand out on their own.
The closest race: Chandgad, Maharashtra was decided by just 11 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, Karad South, Maharashtra was won by a margin of 74.1% of the vote — the widest of the election.
Turnout peaked in Kagal, Maharashtra, at 88.6%.
The single biggest electorate was Belapur, Maharashtra, with 12,81,680 registered voters.
The backdrop
This result kept the balance between the state's two largest parties extremely close.