The Congress triumph over its victory in the Karnataka Assembly elections needs to be tempered by a sobering reality check. The Congress was widely expected to do better in a state that has typically voted out the ruling party for decades and it beat expectations by outperforming most predictions to record its strongest vote share and tally since 1989. It is critical, however, that neither the Congress nor other Opposition parties consider these results a proxy for national trends in the upcoming parliamentary polls in 2024. A cautionary tale lies in the results of the Lok Sabha elections in 2019 for the states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh, just months after the Congress emerged victorious in the Assembly elections in the three states in 2018. In all three states, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept the Lok Sabha seats in the 2019 elections — in Rajasthan, the Congress did not even open its account.