ON THE night of March 8, as news of seats falling like ninepins to the opposition trickled in, a grim Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi and his deputy upped and left the room.

This was the Umno headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, the place where Barisan Nasional (BN) leaders traditionally wait for election news, and the night of Malaysia's 12th general election was no exception - except for the staggering results.

The two men vanished into an adjoining room. The other leaders present - just a handful of them - waited in near silence.

The Prime Minister's son-in-law Khairy Jamaluddin arrived with his wife towards midnight, looking dispirited. He talked in hushed tones to his brother-in-law Kamaluddin Badawi.

When the BN finally won enough seats to form the government - some two hours later than expected - Datuk Seri Abdullah and Deputy Premier Najib Razak came back. By then, both were putting on a brave front and wearing fixed smiles.

A ministerial aide present said no one could believe what they were hearing.

Elsewhere, the opposition was jubilant, but equally astounded.

Mr Tony Pua, the new Democratic Action Party (DAP) MP for Petaling Jaya North, was at the party's operations centre when it suddenly hit him that his would be a landslide victory.

He was shocked when results from the first five counting centres showed him leading three to one in areas typically difficult for the DAP.

He went on to win nearly 20,000 votes more than his rival.

In the final tally, BN held just 140 seats out of 222, less than two-thirds of Parliament, and had let five states slip out its hands.

It was a tsunami no one saw coming.

Well, almost no one. Former finance minister Daim Zainuddin did. Last December, he told China Press that Selangor, Penang and Kedah would be election hot spots based on his feedback. He missed out Perak, but three out of four is pretty impressive.

Datuk Seri Abdullah's response then was: 'Thank you. I will look into it.'

Was there really no warning?

Some party grassroots workers - those in the front line - insist that there wasn't.

An Umno Youth grassroots worker in Terengganu, who has done election work since 1993, said they noticed nothing unusual during their house-to-house calls.

An MCA candidate in Selangor, Datuk Lee Hwa Beng, even thought the signs were positive.

'About 90 per cent of those who came to our booths on Polling Day to check their polling station were Malays. In the past, this was an indication of their support,' he said.

However, this time they voted against him.

But a week after the shocking outcome, most now accept that there were signals. Only that they were very subtle, easy to miss and grossly underestimated.

Mr Pua, who had worked the ground in Petaling Jaya North for more than a year, said he noticed that the reception towards him grew increasingly warm - even from the line-dancing circle, apparently the fount of support for his MCA rival Chew Mei Fun.

On Polling Day, when he made his rounds of the centres, many voters gave him the thumbs-up.

'But we didn't dare believe it then,' he said.

It was rooted in their minds that the BN had the upper hand. And the BN appeared to believe that too.

It was this mindset that had led people to discount the huge DAP rallies in Penang which drew tens of thousands and netted up to RM130,000 (S$57,000) in donations each time.

There were also the queues of volunteers signing up in droves for the opposition. Mr Pua had gathered 400 volunteers and just two paid workers.

These were as clear a signal as any. But no one paid heed to them.

An Umno Youth leader in Kedah blamed it on complacency, in particular among members of the Malay-based party. They were supremely confident of Malay support.

After all, the BN had won a thumping 91 per cent of seats in the 2004 election.

Professor Agus Yusoff, a political scientist, said that the BN had taken things for granted and ignored not just the signs, but also festering issues.

'Because they are in power, they think they can say anything and people will buy it,' he said.

An apparently strong Umno also ignored minority anger, and pushed a harder Malay and Islamic agenda.

The ruling coalition also brushed aside the people's anger over such issues as inflation, corruption and government excesses.

'They were in denial,' said Prof Agus.

Such strong dissatisfaction was not picked up partly because ground shifts in urban areas are harder to detect than in the villages.

The dip in Chinese and Indian support was already anticipated, but signs of the Malay swing were hardly on Umno's radar screens.

According to political analyst Ong Kian Ming, the average Malay vote swing was about 5 per cent across the board, but in urban Penang, Selangor and Kuala Lumpur, it was closer to 10 per cent.

Umno's grassroots intelligence is usually spot-on, especially in the villages.

Party grassroots workers are tasked to track voters by polling streams, and they know pretty well who is with Umno and who is not.

Their job is to woo the fence-sitters. One worker is usually assigned up to 10 voters and the feedback he gives is usually accurate.

But this network is not foolproof. A Kedah campaign worker said he had heard of Umno members working for the BN campaign for pay, but voting for the opposition.

This duplicity tended to occur in seats where popular and local candidates were dropped, especially in order to make way for those seen as cronies of Datuk Seri Abdullah's inner circle.

In this election, it is believed that a cause for the poor feedback received was anger among grassroots workers after their local candidates were dropped.

By its very nature, this intelligence network also works best in rural and close-knit communities.

But the 2008 election was largely lost in the urbanised states where the swing, across all races, was grossly underestimated because urbanites are famously reticent.

The largely rural Kedah, which is 75 per cent Malay, was the one exception. According to Mr Ong's calculations, the Malay support there plunged by 12.7 per cent.

Various theories have been put forward to explain the fall of Kedah, especially since the other two Malay heartland states of Perlis and Terengganu held firm.

Some believe that the Malay swing could be larger in Kedah, partly because Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad's criticisms of Datuk Seri Abdullah had resonated in the former premier's home state, where there is still some vestige of affection for him.

Some also believe that the tsunami might have arrived unnoticed partly because its vast magnitude only built up in the end stages of the longer-thanusual 13-day campaign.

An MCA source said party officials were aware that the Chinese vote would drop quite a bit, but the plunge was a good 15 to 20 per cent greater than anticipated.

He said they believed that more voters could have swung because of the infectious euphoria emerging from the massive DAP rallies in Penang and, to a smaller extent, the opposition rallies in other urban centres.

'The wind started then, and the emotional psyche changed,' he said.

Mr Ibrahim Suffian of pollster Merdeka Centre affirmed this observation. The centre's surveys picked up a drop in Malay support of up to 15 per cent only in the last three days of campaigning.

He attributed this to the vilification of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim in the media around the same time. It brought back memories of 1999 when Datuk Seri Anwar was sacked, an episode that turned the Malays against the BN.

The BN had long known about the shift in the Indian and Chinese ground, though perhaps not its magnitude, but it evidently thought that the Malay ground was stable enough to moderate the minority swing.

It wasn't.

There have also been suggestions that the police and military intelligence had given the leaders an accurate reading of the ground.

Dr Mahathir, one of the few who had given a fairly close prediction of the outcome, hinted that the BN had chosen to ignore this intelligence for its own reasons.

Many analysts now also say the local media had played a role by painting a glowing picture of a near-certain BN victory, and in the process whittled away any hesitation among voters to cast protest votes.

Clearly, protest votes had played a part in the shock outcome. Even the opposition concedes that.

One only has to look at the number of unknown candidates and the odd choices that voters have made to discern the element of protest.

For example, Mr Loh Gwo Burne, who is known only for accidentally videotaping a lawyer boasting about fixing judicial appointments, won against a hugely popular MCA rival in urban Selangor.

It is highly unlikely that Chinese or Malay voters had had a sudden change of heart over the ideologies of PAS or DAP respectively. It is more likely that anger had driven many to vote against the BN.

Whether the opposition will be able to convert this protest vote against the BN into a vote for the opposition remains to be seen.

Last Sunday, there was a sense of palpable euphoria in Kuala Lumpur, a feeling of awe that votes can change a country.

A week later, the euphoria has dissipated. Many Malaysians are now waiting to see how their lives will change under a weakened regime.

Will their embattled leaders choose reform or revenge?

This much seems certain: The rivals are already at the door and, as Prime Minister Abdullah himself said, if he does not bring changes, he will have to up and leave - and this time it will not be just the room.