​Taiwan's local elections are set for Saturday, November 26, with voting hours between 8am-4pm. The vote count will take place in full view of the public at the polling stations as soon as polls close and the last vote has been cast. This decentralized hand count means that the final results will be reported relatively fast (at least by American standards), by midnight local time, and most winners in the high-profile races will be known by 8pm. 

As we wait for the results to roll in, I thought it would be useful to note some of the more distinctive features of Taiwan's system of election management. For readers interested in delving deeper into these issues, I have a working paper on elections in Taiwan that will come out next year in an edited book volume on electoral malpractice and manipulation in Asia. I also did a Twitter thread on the 2020 elections that may be of interest. 

1. No absentee or early voting. Taiwan has never had either option. Instead, voters have to return to the place where their household is registered. Voter rolls are generated automatically from the country's household registration system 20 days before the election, and voters are assigned a precinct based on their official residence.

The downsides of this system are obvious: it places a disproportionate burden on people who live far from their official place of residence, including college students, active-duty military personnel, and overseas citizens. But there are advantages too: voter registration is automatic, ballot distribution and security is streamlined, and the count can take place at the polling place itself and be wrapped up quickly. (Compare with California, where we are still counting ballots for an election that happened on November 8.)

There are also historical reasons why mail-in and early voting options are viewed with skepticism by Taiwan's two major political parties. In the bad old days of martial law, ballot-stuffing was a serious problem in some races. Public vote counts, official campaign observers, and tight controls on blank ballots were developed to combat fraud, as this excellent book chapter by Su Yen-tu documents.

Unfortunately, with Taiwan still dealing with COVID quarantine restrictions, it appears that about 65,000 eligible voters will be trapped in quarantine and unable to vote. Don't blame the Central Election Commission for this: they're just following the election law, which has no provisions for alternative ways to cast a vote. Instead, blame the CECC, which has kept in place a five-day mandatory quarantine for people testing positive, and the legislature, which would need to amend the election law to allow for either early or absentee voting.        

I hope the controversy here starts a more serious discussion about how to add alternative voting methods without undermining the many strengths of Taiwan's electoral process. My own view is that the current system could be adapted to allow early voting much more easily than absentee or mail. For one, early voting wouldn't necessarily require ballot transfers between different precincts, and votes could be kept on-site and counted at the same time as same-day votes. The prospect of absentee voting in Taiwan makes me very nervous: it's much more susceptible to vote-buying, and it also has the potential to completely undermine trust in election outcomes. Imagine, for instance, if a couple hundred thousand ballots cast in mainland China arrived by mail after the election, and swung several critical races toward China-friendly candidates. It would be impossible to persuade most people that those votes were cast freely, without coercion by the CCP...

2. Restrictions on campaign activities. The Civil Servants Elections and Recall Law includes a lot of restrictions on how and where candidates can campaign, what they can pass out, and even when they can officially campaign (only during the 15 days before the election for mayors and county executives, and only five for lower offices!). But in practice, the CEC is only in a position to enforce a few of these, since Taiwan's quite liberal freedom of speech and assembly protections supersede many of these restrictions.

Among the rules that the CEC still strictly enforces are limits on the value of campaign materials passed out to voters (NT$30 per item per person), the time of day campaigns can take place, (7am-10pm), and a blanket ban on campaign activities during Election Day itself, beginning at midnight. Voters cannot wear any kind of clothing with campaign insignias on it to vote, either -- including masks -- and no campaign posters or paraphernalia can be posted within 30 meters of a polling station. Voters cannot use phones or cameras to video during the voting process, either.    

The ban on election-day campaigning has been extended to cyberspace as well, and the CEC takes it very seriously. In 2012, for instance, the Ma Ying-jeou Facebook page posted a simple reminder to supporters on Election Day reminding them to turn out to vote for Ma, and the CEC interpreted this as a violation of the campaign prohibition and fined the Ma campaign NT$500,000. 

The election law also imposes a polling blackout during the 10 days before the election. You may have noticed all the polls on the TVBS polling site are currently down to comply with this restriction -- they'll be back up as soon as the election results are known.   

Finally, if these limits seem intrusive to you, it's worth noting that Taiwan's election restrictions are in practice quite liberal when compared to South Korea, Japan, Singapore, or Malaysia, as this article by Jong-sung You details. Taiwan is a positive outlier in the region on this dimension.  

3. Campaign deposits and campaign subsidies. All candidates for elected office have to pay a deposit in order to qualify for the ballot. The CEC has the discretion to set the amount, which varies by prominence of office. For 2022, the deposit requirements for candidates were:

• special municipalities: mayor - NT$1.5 million; city councilor - NT$200,000
• counties and cities: mayor - NT$200,000; councilor - NT$150,000
• township/town/city: head - NT$150,000; representative - NT$120,000
• special municipality indigenous district: head - NT$150,000; representative - NT$50,000
• village/ward chief: NT$50,000

Candidates receive a refund of this deposit only if they obtain more than 1/10 of the winner's vote share, which a lot of minor candidates do not. One of the more curious features of Taiwan elections is just how many fringe or vanity candidates are willing to spend the considerable sums necessary to qualify for the ballot with little hope of actually getting their deposits back.  

Taiwan also has public subsidies for both political parties and individual candidates. Political parties get a payout every year in proportion to the share of the party vote they got in the last legislative election. Individual candidates in the local elections receive a subsidy after the election of NT$30 per vote received, but only if they obtain at least 1/3 of the winner's vote share. 

These rules appear to me to strike a reasonable balance between allowing access to the ballot for serious candidates, while still discouraging completely frivolous ones. They also include several provisions that increase the value of belonging to a political party, and that tend to privilege the larger, longer-established parties over smaller ones and independent candidates -- all good things for democracy in my view.

4. What if a candidate dies? Article 30 of the Civil Servants Elections and Recall Act specifies that if a candidate dies after the registration deadline, but before Election Day, the election should be stopped and every step in the process redone with a new slate of candidates: announcement of a new Election Day, registration, drawing of ballot numbers, printing of ballots, and so forth. This actually happened in Chiayi City this election cycle: an independent candidate for mayor, Huang Shao-tsung (黃紹聰), was found dead at home, apparently of a heart attack, on November 2.

The CEC has some discretion to decide how to redo the election process, and in the Chiayi City case they decided to postpone Election Day for the mayor's race to December 18. All the rest of the elections in Chiayi City, for councilors and ward chiefs, will still be held on November 26. I'm not sure how common this solution to the death of a candidate is around the world, but it's unheard-of in the US.  

5. Poll workers can be nominated by the candidates themselves. A majority of poll workers, including the head manager and supervisor, are required to be civil servants -- many of them schoolteachers. In fact, according to the Elections and Recall Law Article 59, civil servants are required to serve as poll workers if nominated. In addition, political parties and all candidates themselves can nominate some poll workers in each precinct; workers are drawn by lot when the number of nominees exceeds the required number.

This poll worker provision was introduced in the 1960s to act as a check on the ballot stuffing and fraud that frequently occurred then, and it offered candidates a way to monitor each ballot box and increase trust in the vote count. It's generally worked quite well ever since. By far the biggest threat to electoral integrity in Taiwan since the 1980s has been vote-buying, rather than fraud at the ballot box. 

On November 29, I'm going to speak about the Taiwan local election outcomes at the Hoover Institution. The event is virtual; online attendance is free and open to the public. Register at the event page. The abstract is below. 

In anticipation of this talk, I've attempted to keep track of the candidates and campaigns in each county and municipality on this blog; you can find the details here:

Part 1. The Six Special Municipalities
Part 2. North and Central Taiwan
Part 3. The South, East, and Offshore Islands
Part 4. Concluding Thoughts
Local Elections Update, One Month Out 

On behalf of the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region (PTIP) and its National Security Task Force, the Hoover Institution invites you to Taiwan’s 2022 Local Election Results: What Happened and What It Means on Tuesday, November 29, 2022  from 4:00 - 5:15 PT.

On November 26, 2022, Taiwan's electorate will go to the polls to select 22 mayors and county executives, several hundred council members, and thousands of other local offices. Voters will also decide on a constitutional amendment to lower the voting age from 20 to 18. This talk will cover the results of the elections and discuss the implications for Taiwan's future, including cross-Strait relations, local governance, party politics, President Tsai Ing-wen’s last 18 months in office, and the race to succeed her in 2024.

Taiwan's 2022 local elections are now exactly four weeks away, on Saturday, November 26. In August I did a detailed breakdown of all the city and county executive races, which you can find here: 

Part 1. The Six Special Municipalities
Part 2. North and Central Taiwan
Part 3. The South, East, and Offshore Islands
Part 4. Concluding Thoughts

I've been sporadically adding news updates and polling results to those pages, but I thought it'd be worth taking a more holistic view now that we're a month away, and raise a few questions to keep an eye on the last month of the campaign.  

First, the big takeaway: this is looking more and more  like a bad election cycle for the DPP.

Here's my updated ratings for each race as of October 29: 

• Safe KMT (1): Hsinchu County, Lienchiang* 
• Likely KMT (6): New Taipei, Taichung; Nantou, Chiayi City, Hualien, Taitung
• Leans KMT (6): Taipei, Taoyuan; Keelung, Yilan, Changhua, Yunlin 
• Toss-up (4): Hsinchu City, Miaoli*, Penghu*, Kinmen*
• Leans DPP (0):
• Likely DPP (1): Pingtung 
• Safe DPP (3): Tainan, Kaohsiung, Chiayi County

*multiple KMT candidates in the race

What's Going on in the Special Municipalities?
In the highest profile races in the special municipality, ​DPP candidates are down at least 10 points (and probably 20) in both New Taipei (Lin Chia-lung) and Taichung (Tsai Chi-chang). I've been especially surprised by how well incumbent mayor Lu Shiow-yen in Taichung is polling. I figured she would struggle a bit but instead recent polling shows her to be leading by 20 points, and she is in high demand to campaign for other KMT candidates down ballot. It would take something truly extraordinary to shake this race up now. 

In Taoyuan, the candidate switcheroo and split has left the party's official nominee, Cheng Yun-peng, trailing the KMT's Simon Chang in most polls too. 

Taipei is the marquee race of this cycle, with three high-profile candidates and saturation coverage of the campaign. It's close, but even there polls keep showing Chiang Wan-an with an edge over the DPP's Chen Shih-chung and independent candidate Huang Shan-shan. Chiang appears to have consolidated 85% of the pan-blue vote behind him, while Chen is at only 70% of the pan-green vote. Huang Shan-shan is pulling as much support from green-leaning as blue-leaning voters, and that may be enough to give Chiang the win. Chen's efforts to nationalize the race and make it about cross-Strait relations or China do not seem to be having much effect so far. 

Is the DPP Really Struggling This Badly? 
Given recent polling, one can easily imagine the DPP only winning four local executive races. (Keep in mind they currently hold seven, and that's after the disastrous 2018 election cycle.) There's still time for public opinion to shift, but right now the DPP looks like it's in danger of losing all four of the competitive special municipality races. The party's candidates are also struggling elsewhere in places where they have very winnable races, in Yilan, Keelung, and Hsinchu. And they don't seem to be primed for an upset anywhere else; the KMT's incumbents in Chiayi City, Changhua, Yunlin, Taitung and Hualien are all polling well ahead of their challengers. The DPP's best chance at an unexpected pickup might be Penghu, where there are now two KMT members (one the mayor of the largest city, the other the incumbent) in the race. Then there's the crazy colorful Miaoli race, which Donovan Courtney Smith has described in great detail. The DPP might have a chance there in what's normally one of the bluest counties in Taiwan...except the NPP is also running a candidate and threatening to split the anti-KMT vote. So far the DPP just can't catch a break this cycle. 

​Is Tsai Ing-wen in Trouble? 
Put it all together and it looks like Tsai Ing-wen's grip on the party chair might be in trouble again. If we take into account the DPP's large national polling lead, the partisan lean of the counties, and the fact that incumbents are hard to beat, the party's candidates should be competitive at least in Taipei and Taoyuan (both open seat contests), Keelung (open seat) and Yilan (wounded KMT incumbent), Hsinchu City (open seat), and perhaps Changhua, Yunlin, and Chiayi City (all green-leaning counties). If the party can't win any of those races, that's a really bad performance, and there will be a lot of pressure on Tsai to resign as party leader to take responsibility. She's been directly involved in picking the nominees for these races, and she can't easily deflect blame if they fail everywhere. 

Is the KMT Actually Primed for a Comeback...Again?
On the flip side, KMT party chairman Eric Chu may end up a big winner here after all. He said back in August that his goal was to win four of the six special municipalities; it seemed to me like a stretch at the time, but it looks plausible now. The party has had some nomination screw-ups and splits, most prominently in Taoyuan and Miaoli but also Keelung, Penghu and Kinmen. But even if the KMT loses a couple of these races to independents (or the TPP in Hsinchu City), Chu will still come out looking pretty good if they take four special municipalities. And the KMT might be better-positioned than expected to compete in 2024.

​Will Cross-Strait Relations Matter? 
Finally, a note about the 20th Party Congress: I thought this week of CCP pageantry and propaganda might affect the race, since it was held in the thick of the election campaigns. But there wasn't a whole lot new on Taiwan coming out of the Congress, and polls aren't showing much of an impact. Tsai Ing-wen's personal approval rating does seem to have gotten a bounce in October--we'll see if that lasts, or more importantly, influences the local contests in the last month. Notably, several DPP candidates including Chen Shih-chung in Taipei have tried to tie their races to cross-Strait issues, without much success so far.   

​Plagiarism: What Is It? 
Definition here.

On behalf of the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region, and its National Security Task Force, the Hoover Institution invites you to How the Ukraine Crisis Shapes Taiwan’s Public Opinion -- and Beyond​ on Tuesday, October 18, 2022 from 4:00 - 5:00 PST.

Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine and Ukraine’s response has changed the calculation of war strategies and US involvement worldwide. On the other side of the world, a potential 2027 China invasion of Taiwan looms over the stability of East Asia, and public opinion in democratic Taiwan plays a crucial role in its own choice of security strategies. How does the Ukraine crisis influence or shape the Taiwanese people’s preference for security and foreign policies? How might the US response and presence in Europe and East Asia play a role in Taiwan? In this talk, Dr. Austin Horng-En Wang traces and analyzes public opinion in Taiwan before and after the start of the Ukraine crisis and explains how the changes across subgroups are likely to impact the upcoming elections in Taiwan and the future of the US-Taiwan relationship.

Featuring Austin Horng-En Wang, Assistant Professor University of Nevada, Las Vegas, followed by a conversation with Kharis Templeman Research Fellow Hoover Institution.

Dr. Austin Horng-En Wang is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His research focuses on political psychology, public opinion, and the politics of East Asia. His research articles can be found in the Journal of Peace Research, Social Media + Society, Asian Survey, and Political Research Quarterly, among others. He is the recipient of The Wilson Center 2021 China Fellowship, Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation 2020 Scholarship, and Global Taiwan Institute 2019 Scholarship.​

The Institute of East Asian Studies at UC Berkeley is accepting applications for the second cohort of next-generation Taiwan scholars and policymakers. The goal of this program is to nurture a new generation of U.S. experts on Taiwan, cross-Strait relations, and U.S.-Taiwan relations. As Taiwan's importance to U.S. security and economic interests in the region has increased over the last few years, so has the need for a deeper bench of people who specialize in the politics, economics, society, and culture of Taiwan. 

The deadline for applications for this cycle is November 1. Applicants "must be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident, and hold a tenure-track position in a U.S. institution of higher education or  equivalent experience as a mid-career specialist in the public or private sector." 

Note that they really mean this second part -- if you are in the private sector or hold a government or think tank job, this program is also intended for you! Most of the participants in the first cohort did not hold a tenure-track position. 

Additional details can be found below and at the program website.

About the Program 
The Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS) at UC Berkeley has for over two decades facilitated the dissemination of research on Taiwan through conferences, workshops, lectures, and publications. Keeping in that vein, IEAS, with generous support from the Taiwan Economic and Cultural Office (TECO) in San Francisco, is accepting applications for the second cohort of the U.S.-Taiwan Next Generation Working Group: an in-depth training program for scholars and policymakers with an interest in U.S.-Taiwan relations who show promise as future experts on foreign affairs in relation to Taiwan.

​The U.S.-Taiwan Next Generation Working Group is a three-year program, through which a cohort of ten specialists will be selected to participate in a series of meetings in Washington D.C., California, and Taipei. At these meetings, participants will have opportunities to discuss issues of importance to U.S.-Taiwan relations with policymakers, government officials, business, and opinion leaders in Taiwan and the United States. Participants will be expected to develop a policy paper on an issue of importance to the U.S.-Taiwan bilateral relationship under the guidance of the program’s Senior Advisors (Thomas B. Gold, UC Berkeley; Shelley Rigger, Davidson College; and Jude Blanchette, CSIS), as well as submit short reflection papers after each of the three meetings. The Senior Advisors will facilitate and participate in program meetings, and advise participants on how to effectively engage with the media, participate in the policymaking process, and expand their professional networks. When opportunities arise, members of the working group will be invited and encouraged to present their research findings at conferences and other venues throughout the project period in both the United States and Taiwan.

​Program Goals
The program aims to identify, nurture, and build a community of American public policy intellectuals across a wide range of sectors and facilitate spin-offs of policy-oriented research teams and projects. In all, it will contribute to the understanding of Taiwanese points of view in international venues and support Taiwan and the United States in promoting their key mutual ideas and values as leaders in the international community by facilitating deeper and more vigorous dialogue and research not only on topics of immediate concern to the bilateral relationship, but also on ways to strengthen U.S.-Taiwan coordination in global affairs.

For the rest of this preview, see: Part I. Part II. Part III.

Summing up, here's the ratings as of August 16:

• Safe KMT (2): Kinmen, Lienchiang 
• Likely KMT (6): New Taipei, Hsinchu County, Nantou, Chiayi City, Hualien, Taitung
• Leans KMT (8): Taipei, Taichung, Keelung, Hsinchu City, Miaoli, Changhua, Yunlin, Penghu 
• Toss-up (1): Taoyuan
• Leans DPP (1): Yilan 
• Likely DPP (1): Pingtung 
• Safe DPP (3): Tainan, Kaohsiung, Chiayi County

By way of conclusion, here are five observations on the 2022 local elections three months out: 

1. The KMT is down but not out. There is now a frequent refrain among outside observers that the KMT is just hopelessly disorganized and dysfunctional and cannot mount a serious challenge to the DPP anymore, until and unless it changes its position on cross-Strait relations. Maybe. But going through race by race here suggests the party's candidates are still very competitive in local elections. By my own count, I have the KMT nominee favored right now to win in 16 of 22 localities -- that's more than they control today. 

Perhaps I'm being too generous to the blue camp here -- and after adding the numbers up I'm feeling a wee bit uncomfortable with how lopsided they are -- but one can at least make a reasonable case that the KMT will hold a majority of local executives after these elections, IF (big if) the national environment doesn't turn against it. Despite a rough few years, the party still has significant residual strength at the local level, and reports of its impending demise have been greatly exaggerated. 

​2. HOWEVA, there is a lot of downside risk for the KMT. Since 2014, all local elections in Taiwan have been held concurrently. As a result, outcomes across races have been more correlated than they used to be. The last two election cycles have produced big swings against the party in power: in 2014, President Ma Ying-jeou's approval ratings were under 20 percent, and the DPP flipped seven counties and cities as part of an anti-KMT wave election. In 2018, Tsai's ratings were under 30 percent, and the KMT swept all the competitive races except for Taipei, where Mayor Ko barely hung on.

In this election cycle, the KMT is playing defense: they hold 14 of the 22 local posts and will do well just to keep that number. More than six years into her presidency, Tsai Ing-wen has defied the second-term curse and her approval ratings have been positive for most of the last two years. The KMT's party ID numbers have fallen far behind the DPP (the latest NCCU/ESC polls have DPP identifiers at 31% of respondents, and the KMT at a record-low 14%.) And US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan in early August has triggered an extended round of military exercises and bellicose rhetoric from Beijing that has put the KMT on the defensive again. As the "China-friendly" party in Taiwan, the KMT has traditionally suffered politically when the salience of the threat from the PRC increases. (This is arguably a big part of the reason Tsai Ing-wen was re-elected in 2020.)

It's possible that a natural disaster, a worsening COVID situation, a new government scandal or two, or just a general weariness with the DPP could drag down the central government's popularity over the next three months. But if Beijing's military exercises and pressure campaign on Taiwanese agricultural products continue, they are likely to help the DPP and hurt the KMT. In addition, the CCP's 20th Party Congress will likely happen sometime in November [update 8.30: it will begin earlier, on Oct 16], where expectations are that Xi Jinping will be confirmed for a third term as General Party Secretary. Not since 1992 has this meeting been held around the same time as a major Taiwanese election (the 14th Party Congress was 12-18 October, and the LY election was 19 December), and, depending on what is said about Taiwan there, it has the potential to trigger another public opinion backlash in Taiwan against the PRC, much like Xi Jinping's January 2, 2019 speech to "Taiwan compatriots" led to a rebound in Tsai Ing-wen's approval ratings.  

So, despite having a strong slate of candidates for local office, the KMT could easily lose most of the competitive races if the salience of cross-Strait relations remains high through the fall.       

3. Nominations are half the battle. Both major parties moved away from the polling primaries method they've used in the past to select nominees, and instead empowered the chair to "negotiate" or hand-pick nominees in most races. The DPP has done this a lot during the Tsai Ing-wen era; one of her political gifts is effectively managing the intra-party fights over offices and spoils in a way that keeps everyone onside. She's mostly succeeded at that again here, although the party's slate of nominees as a whole seems rather underwhelming to me. Despite their recent success at the national level, the DPP still doesn't have a deep bench of local politicians who have built up grass-roots networks and can play the factional game as well as the KMT. And in places like Chiayi, Yunlin, or Changhua, winning that game can still be decisive.

On the KMT side, Eric Chu had a couple well-publicized nomination fiascos in Taoyuan and Miaoli. But in most of the other races, the party has recruited well. Chu's task has been made easier by having incumbents to renominate in many races, which has helped head off the kind of factional squabbling that has bedeviled the party in the past. It's especially notable that with popular mayors running again in Chiayi City, Changhua, and Yunlin, the KMT is well-positioned to hold on in several jurisdictions that have become reliably "green" in national elections.

Both major parties still face threats in several races from spoiler candidates from the minor parties, the NPP and TPP. The NPP is now firmly in the pan-green camp, and the presence of its nominees will almost certainly hurt the DPP more, as they did in the 2020 legislative elections. The TPP is new to local politics this cycle, and it is trying to position itself as more centrist than the KMT. It could erode support for or even eclipse the KMT, as some recent public polling has shown it might; but given the long track record of third party candidates in Taiwan underperforming in elections relative to early polls, I'll believe it only when I see it. 

4. Does the amendment to lower the voting age have a chance? Unlike in 2018, there’s not going to be referendums held alongside the local elections. There will, however, be a vote on a constitutional amendment to lower the voting age, from 20 to 18 years old. There is no open partisan opposition to the amendment, which passed the legislature 109-0 on March 25. But it does require the support of half of all eligible voters to take effect -- not just half of those voting. With an electorate of 19.3 million, that means 9.65 million yes votes are required for approval. So it will need high turnout in the local elections, and even so it is far from certain the proposal will get enough support to pass the threshold. This is the first time the voters will decide on a constitutional amendment since the new procedure was adopted in 2005. 

​5. Year of the Woman? I was surprised at just how well-represented women are in both parties this cycle. Either the KMT or DPP has nominated a woman in 2 of 6 special municipalities, and 10 of 16 other races. In 3 races (Nantou, Changhua, and Hualien), both candidates are women. Taiwan rightly gets a lot of attention for having a woman as president and increasing representation in the legislature (41% in 2020, up from 38% in 2016). But the numbers at the local level are also striking: one can easily imagine a result in 2022 where women end up leading a majority of Taiwan's localities, in Taipei, Taoyuan, Taichung, Yilan, Hsinchu City, Nantou, Changhua, Chiayi City, Yunlin, Pingtung, Hualien, and Taitung.

​That’s all the more impressive because the cabinet still looks like this: 

And the top of Taiwanese academia looks like this:

And the business world still looks like this: 

Electoral politics really is a women’s profession in Taiwan, which makes it exceptional in the region, and a nice contrast to Japan and Korea, and of course these guys across the Strait: 

​For more on how women came to be so prominent in Taiwanese elections, check out this explanation from Huang Chang-ling about Taiwan's gender quotas and their long-term effects on women's advancement in politics. Nathan Batto also has a great paper on this topic. 

​KMT: Renominated incumbent mayor Huang Min-hui (黃敏惠).
DPP: Nominated former legislator and deputy mayor Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) on June 28. 
Others: Four independents, including the novelty candidate formerly known as Huang Hong-cheng (黃宏成).
T-PVI: G+4
​Notes:

• Huang is a rare bird: a popular KMT mayor of a green city. How, you might ask? Her father was Huang Yung-chin (黃永欽), a long-time Taiwan Provincial Assembly member and the head of the leading faction in both the city and the county. The conventional story is that she inherited his long-standing networks and has maintained them. That has given her deep political influence which extends across the green-blue divide. She also served two previous terms as Chiayi City mayor, from 2005-2014. 
• Lee Chun-yi held the Chiayi City seat in the legislature for two terms (2012-2020), but lost the DPP's primary in 2019 to Wang Mei-hui (王美惠), who is now the legislator for Chiayi (not to be confused with Huang Min-hui the mayor). Lee then became a deputy secretary-general of the Presidential Office, which has become a place where losing candidates in good standing with Tsai Ing-wen go to have something to do for awhile. Lee has now been sent back down to Chiayi to challenge Wang.
• Update 9.2. The writer formerly known as Huang Hong-cheng (黃宏成) is a perennial candidate who's most well-known for changing his name multiple times. He was originally reported to be planning to run in Hualien race but registered here instead. The election deposit for the county/city mayor's races is NT$200,000, or about US$6300 at current exchange rates, which candidates forfeit if they do not win at least 1/10 of the winner's vote share. That makes running for office a fairly expensive hobby, and is one reason that Taiwan has fewer novelty candidates than, say, the UK, where in a fine British tradition Boris Johnson had to appear on stage with Lord Buckethead and Elmo to hear his constituency win announced.  
• Update 11.3. This race has been suspended and rescheduled for December 18! One of the minor candidates, Huang Shao-tsung (黃紹聰), died suddenly on Wednesday. According to the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act, Article 30, if a candidate dies after the registration deadline but before Election Day, the CEC must pause the election and restart the process of registration, drawing numbers, reprinting ballots, and so forth.
• This suspension clause in Taiwan's election law has apparently been informally called the "anti-assassination clause" -- I don't know the history here but am now intrigued...I also don't know how common this kind of provision is around the world. In the US, the election would typically still be held as scheduled, although like everything else in US elections, the practice varies depending on state vs federal law and across the states, and it often ends up decided by a court ruling, as this recent case in Minnesota demonstrates. (For comparison, here's Kentucky's procedure: votes for a dead candidate simply won't be counted; versus Texas: votes are counted, and if the deceased candidate wins, the resulting "vacancy" is filled "in the regular manner," either appointment or by-election.) 
• Both Huang Min-hui and Lee Chun-yi are unhappy with the postponement. The danger for Huang is that the separate, later date makes her a bigger target for the DPP. She's also the candidate in the lead and wants to avoid anything that would shake up the race...like a postponement. The law gives the CEC a lot of discretion here to decide how to reschedule the election process; they've decided to prioritize sticking to the normal timeline rather than rushing to complete registration, drawing of lots for ballot order, and ballot reprinting in the next 23 days. In my view that's probably the right decision, although it's likely to affect turnout in this race (keep in mind the local councilors and ward  chief elections in Chiayi City will all still be held on Nov. 26 alongside the constitutional referendum). 

Polls: 

• 2022.10.18-22: RWNews is publishing polling results for a lot of the second-tier races, including Chiayi City. Results here come in in line with my priors: they show the KMT's Huang leading the DPP's Lee, 58-27%. I'm unfamiliar with RWNews's track record, but they are using an online poll that NTU professor Chang Yu-tsung organized, and they do provide a fairly detailed description of the sampling method. The poll is weighted by sex, age, and location of residence (but not education?). Chang is part of the Asiabarometer survey team at Tai-Da and knows what he's doing, so I'm going to include these results where they're available.

Rating: Likely KMT. Huang consistently ranks at or near the top of popularity ratings of all of Taiwan's mayors and magistrates, and her place at the center of the Huang faction's networks puts her in a strong position to win despite being a KMT mayor in a G+4 city. Lee is a decent candidate who is well-known to the Chiayi electorate already, but he has an uphill battle here.  

KMT: Nominated former legislator Wang Yu-min (also known as Alicia Wang 王育敏) on August 3. 
DPP: Renominated incumbent Weng Chang-liang (翁章梁). 
Others: None.
T-PVI: G+8
Notes: 

• Weng won this office easily in 2018, a very bad year for the DPP nationally, and his approval ratings have been among the highest of all local executives for his first term. His real challenge was in the primary; he's part of legislator and former executive Chen Ming-wen's (陳明文) faction in the county, and he defeated the rival Chang faction's nominee, county speaker Chang Ming-ta (張明達).
• Wang is a protege of former president Ma Ying-jeou and was appointed the first executive director of the Ma Ying-jeou Cultural Foundation in 2018. She entered the legislature in 2012 as a party list legislator; in 2016 her #12 ranking was high enough to keep her there for another term. 
• Wang looks like a sacrificial lamb here; her main qualification seems to be that she was born in the county. 

Polls: 

• 2022.10.18-22: RWNews online poll finds Weng leading Wang, 48-32%. Weng coming in a bit below expectations here but still safely in the lead.  

​Rating: Safe DPP. Weng's popularity in deep green Chiayi County, and the lack of a challenger from other factions, makes him a prohibitive favorite for reelection. 

KMT: Renominated incumbent Chang Li-shan (張麗善).
DPP: Nominated legislator Liu Chien-kuo (劉建國) on April 27. ​
Others: One minor candidate, Lin Chia-yu (林佳瑜).  
T-PVI: G+6
Notes:

• ​Chang is part of the most powerful political family in Yunlin, the Chang family. Her older brother Chang Jung-wei (張榮味) won two terms as Yunlin County magistrate, in 1999 and 2001. He was convicted of vote-buying in the 1994 county council council election, but only exhausted his court appeals in 2005 and was removed from office then. He was later sentenced to prison for accepting bribes in a case related to the construction of the Mailiao incinerator plant, and was in prison from July 2018 to May 2021. The Chang family has maintained considerable influence in Yunlin through local agricultural cooperative associations. 
• Chang Li-shan first entered electoral politics in 2004, when she won a seat in the LY as an independent. She served one term but didn't win a nomination to a single-member district in the new, smaller legislature in 2008. She was the KMT's candidate for Yunlin county executive in 2009, then suddenly pulled out that September, leaving the KMT scrambling to find an alternative. She eventually ran as the KMT nominee in the next cycle, losing to the DPP's Lee Chin-yung (李進勇), 57-43%. She tried again in 2018 and turned the tables on Lee, winning that race 54-42%.     
• Factional politics in Yunlin are complicated, and to add to the confusion, everyone seems to be named Chang (張). The Chang Jung-wei faction of which Chang Li-shan is a part has sometimes been allied with the KMT, and sometimes independent. Even members of Chang Jung-wei's family have sometimes fought against one another in elections here. 
• Yunlin is a largely rural agricultural county with no major cities and a long history of environmental activism. The Mailiao petrochemical plant complex on the coast has resulted in some serious environmental damage and fears of elevated cancer risks. Environmental issues are especially salient in the county. 
• Liu got his start on the Yunlin County Council, first winning a seat in 2002. He gained national attention in 2008 when he ran for the legislature in Yunlin 1, lost, then accused his opponent Chang Sho-wen (張碩文) of the KMT of vote-buying. Chang lost the case and was stripped of his seat in 2009, and Liu won the by-election to replace him. He's represented Yunlin 1 ever since. He's not named Chang so he's got that going for himself at least. 
• Update 9.2. Independent candidate Lin Chia-yu is a dentist who previously ran in 2018, winning 1.57% of the vote. 

Polls: 

• 2022.9.22-25: SET News with an in-house poll that finds Chang leading Liu 37-28%, with 38% undecided. The same poll also finds generic partisan support for DPP at 26%, KMT at 15%, TPP at 12%, and NPP at 5%. 

Rating: Leans KMT. Yunlin is in the Hoklo agricultural heartland of southern Taiwan and should be a deep green DPP stronghold, as it has been at the presidential level for 20 years. But as in most of rural Taiwan, factional politics complicates elections for the legislature and county-level positions here. Chang Li-shan enjoys the power of incumbency and decent approval ratings, in addition to her family background. My expectation is that she's likely to win re-election unless it's an especially bad year for the KMT nationally.   

KMT: Nominated former legislator Su Ching-chuan (蘇清泉).
DPP: Nominated party-list legislator Chou Chun-mi (周春米) on April 27. 
Others: The NPP is running a candidate here, Chan Chih-chun (詹智鈞). No others.
T-PVI: G+6
​Notes: 

• Popular DPP incumbent Pan Men-an (潘孟安) is term-limited out and it's not clear what he'll do next; at one point he was even mentioned as a possibility for the party's nomination in New Taipei. 
• Unusually for this cycle, the DPP held a polling primary for Pingtung, which was contested by three DPP legislators: Chou, her fellow party list legislator Chiang Jui-hsiung (莊瑞雄), and Chung Chia-pin (鍾佳濱) from Pingtung 1. All three were backed by different party heavyweights. Chou is part of the New Tide Faction in the DPP and was supported by incumbent Pan. Chung was backed by the previous Pingtung county executive, Tsao Chi-hung (曹啟鴻). And Chuang was supported by former LY speaker Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全). 
• Chou is a former district court judge. She was elected on the DPP's party list to the LY in 2016 and 2020, but has never run for office in Pingtung before. She does, however, come from a political family in the county: her father, Chou Hui-huang (周輝煌), served as a KMT county councilor in the 1970s. One of the criticisms leveled against her in the primary was that she was too friendly with local KMT leaders.    
• The KMT's nominee Su Ching-chuan ran previously in 2008 for the legislature in Pingtung 3, losing 51-43% to Pan Men-an. He was added to the KMT's party list in 2012, serving one term as a legislator. He then ran in 2018 for the county executive, also losing that race to Pan, 56-43%, in a very pro-KMT year. Maybe without Pan on the ballot he's got a chance?   
• Chan is a neurologist at Pingtung Christian Hospital and the head of the NPP Pingtung chapter.
• Pingtung has been reliably green in recent years. It also lost an LY seat in the 2020 reapportionment, which eliminated the bluest, Pingtung City-based district that the KMT held from 2008-2016, so there's no incumbent legislator from the blue camp who could mount a challenge. But as in many of the more rural parts of Taiwan, the KMT retains a stronger presence in the townships and the county councils of Pingtung than its performance at higher levels would indicate.      

Polls: 

• 2022.9.27-10.1: RWNews online poll finds Chou ahead, but not by much: 37% to Su at 35%, with Chan at 4%. That's much closer than expected, and it suggests some lingering unhappiness in the green camp with the primary contest.

Rating: Likely DPP. For the DPP, the polling results helped resolve what could have been a prolonged schism in Pingtung. Chou should be the next Pingtung County executive unless something goes badly wrong with the party's post-primary reconciliation here. 

KMT: Renominated incumbent magistrate Hsu Chen-wei (徐榛蔚). 
DPP: Nominated presidential spokeswoman Kolas Yotaka on July 5. 
Others: Perennial candidate Huang Shih-peng (黃師鵬). No others. 
T-PVI: B+20
​Notes: 

• Kolas's nomination instantly made Hualien a race to watch. As the spokeswoman for the Presidential Office and a close aide of Tsai Ing-wen, she is the most high-profile indigenous member of the DPP government. If she wins, Kolas would be to my knowledge only the second indigenous Taiwanese ever to serve as a county or city executive -- the first was Chen Chien-nian (陳建年), the father of current DPP legislator Chen Ying (陳瑩), who as a KMT member served two terms as magistrate of Taitung County from 1993-2001 and was then appointed to be head of the Council of Indigenous Peoples in the Chen Shui-bian administration. 
• Hsu is the ex-wife of the previous county executive Fu Kun-chi (傅崐萁), who was convicted of insider trading and stock manipulation way back in 2005. Fu remained out on appeal and managed to win two elections for Hualien magistrate in the interim, in 2009 and 2014. He was finally removed from office in 2018, but then ran for and won the Hualien legislative seat in 2020, defeating current ambassador to the US Bi-khim Hsiao (蕭美琴) 46.0-40.5%. After exhausting his last appeal he went to prison in May 2020, and was released early on parole in May 2021. He's now rejoined the KMT and was elected to the party's Central Standing Committee in March 2022. Yikes. But hey--at least he's not a plagiarist?
• Fu and Hsu's divorce was a transparent attempt to circumvent Taiwan's "relatives clause" in the Public Officials Conflict of Interest Act (公職人員利益衝突迴避法) that prevents spouses and family members of officials from receiving appointments or contracts; just before he was removed from office, Fu appointed Hsu as his deputy in Hualien, and she subsequently has run the county government in his stead. If there's one race that would symbolize a victory against local corruption and black gold politics this round, Hualien county executive is it. 
• Despite all that, Hsu crushed her opponent in 2018, 71-25%, to win a full term as Hualien County executive, and her approval ratings have been near the top of all local executives for the last four years.
• Hualien is normally quite blue (B+20) at the presidential level, in part because of its large indigenous population -- now over a quarter of the Hualien electorate (27% in 2020). So one key variable is how much support Kolas might be able to draw from indigenous voters. Her background may not be as much of a help here as one might expect; there has long been a gulf between elite indigenous activists like Kolas and voters in indigenous villages.  
• Independent candidate Huang Shih-peng won only 2.6% of the vote in 2018, and 1.5% in 2014.   

Polls: 

• 2022.10.11-15: RWNews online poll shows Hsu leading Kolas 53-33%. Consistent with my expectations. 

Rating: likely KMT. Hsu enjoys an incumbency advantage and the support of her ex-husband's political networks, and Hualien is difficult political terrain for the DPP. 

KMT: Renominated incumbent magistrate Rao Ching-ling (also spelled Yao 饒慶鈴). 
DPP: Nominated legislator Liu Chao-hao (劉櫂豪) on July 5.
Others: One independent, Chen Chang-hung (陳長宏). 
T-PVI: B+18
Notes:

• Rao comes from a political family; her father Yao (Rao?) Eng-chi (饒穎奇) was a KMT legislator from Taitung from 1981-2005 and served as deputy LY speaker from 1999-2002. The younger Rao earned a PhD in political science from National Taiwan University in 2005, then went back to Taitung and won a county council seat. She quickly moved up there, becoming deputy council speaker in 2006, and speaker in 2009 -- the first woman to hold that position. In 2018 she beat KMT legislator and party caucus leader Sufin Siluko for the party's Taitung County executive nomination, and she then won the general election with 59% of the vote over Liu Chao-hao.  
• Liu also comes from a political family in Taitung, and he has been a consistent over-performer, winning the legislative seat here in 2012 in an upset, then winning comfortably in 2016 and 2020, in what has traditionally been one of the bluest counties in Taiwan. But running for county executive is a much harder challenge for a DPP candidate: as in Hualien, the county electorate includes indigenous voters, while the Taitung legislative district does not. About 35 percent of eligible voters in Taitung are indigenous -- the highest share of any jurisdiction in Taiwan.
• Indigenous voters overwhelmingly support the KMT, or at least pan-blue candidates. Why? The traditional explanation is a combination of KMT patronage networks, family ties (many retired mainland soldiers settled in rural areas and married indigenous women), and a general distrust of the DPP and its association with the Hoklo ethnic majority. For more see this great paper by Scott Simon. That pattern may be changing some: in the 2020 elections a DPP candidate, Saidai Tarovecahe (伍麗華) won a seat in the highlands indigenous constituency, while Chen Ying (陳瑩) won again in the lowlands constituency. 
• Liu has been a perennial candidate in the Taitung county executive election: this will be his sixth (!) attempt at the office. His closest run was in 2009, when he lost 53-47%. In the last race in 2018, he lost to Rao by about 20 points. It would take something truly unexpected to make this race competitive this time around. But Liu is still probably the strongest candidate the DPP could put forward here.

Polls: 

• 2022.10.11-15: RWNews online poll shows Rao leading Liu, 56-31%. In line with my priors. 

​Rating: likely KMT. Liu's ability to survive three election cycles as a DPP member representing a blue county is impressive. But to have a chance in the county executive race, he needs to make major inroads among the indigenous voters of Taitung as well. Otherwise, this is Rao's race to lose.  

KMT: Renominated incumbent Lai Feng-wei (賴峰偉). 
DPP: Nominated former magistrate Chen Kuang-fu (陳光復) on August 10.
Others: Magong mayor Yeh Chu-lin (葉竹林) left the KMT in 2021. 
T-PVI: B+4
Notes: 

• The first of three offshore island counties, Penghu is the one whose party politics look most like mainland Taiwan. At the presidential level, Penghu County has tended to track closely the national trends: it went blue in 2008 and 2012, and green in 2016 and 2020. The Penghu legislative seat has been held since 2012 by a DPP member, Yang Yao (楊耀).
• For whatever reason the DPP has always struggled in the magistrate races here. In 2014, Chen Kuang-fu won, becoming only the 2nd DPP member ever to be county executive. But in 2018, he lost to the KMT's Lai Feng-wei 39-33% despite a pan-blue split. The party does not seem to have a deep bench here, and could not convince Yang Yao to run. Ultimately the DPP opted to send out Chen again for a rematch.
• Update 9.2. ​Yeh Chu-lin was a surprise late entrant to the race, registering on September 1. He is the two-term mayor of Magong, Penghu's only city.  

Rating: leans KMT. Lai's incumbency advantage and a neutral national political climate are probably enough to deliver him to another four-year term. But this could easily slip to the DPP if an independent emerges to pull votes away from Lai, or if there's a bad KMT environment at the national level.  
Update 9.23: toss-up. With Yeh Chu-lan's run, suddenly there is a pan-blue split here, too, and Penghu now looks like a true toss-up. Over half of Penghu voters live in Magong City, so Yeh starts out with a formidable base. The incumbent Lai only won 39% of the vote last time so both Yeh and Chen have a good shot here in a three-way race. 

KMT: Renominated incumbent magistrate Yang Cheng-wu (楊鎮浯) on April 20. 
DPP: Unless I've missed an announcement, the DPP still hasn't found anyone to run here this time around. 
Others: The previous magistrate Chen Fu-hai (陳福海) registered on the last day, along with a third candidate, KMT county councilor Lee Ying-wen (李應文). Three other independents.
T-PVI: B+37
Notes:

• Kinmen and Matsu are just off the coast of Fujian proper, and are the deepest of deep blue jurisdictions. Until the last decade, the DPP didn't even try to compete here. Its best showing ever was in the 2016 legislative election, when Chen Tsang-chiang (陳滄江) won 23.7% of the vote.  
• Yang won a close race in 2018, 47.5-46.2%, against the independent incumbent, Chen Fu-hai (陳福海). Yang was previously Kinmen's representative in the Legislative Yuan from 2016-18. 
• The current legislator from Kinmen, Chen Yu-chen (陳玉珍), considered challenging Yang this year, but the KMT central leadership apparently persuaded her to stay out of the race this cycle, and she endorsed Yang on April 20.
• The man Yang beat, Chen Fu-hai, has declared he won't attempt a rematch this time around.
• Update 9.2. And we have a race: both the previous magistrate Chen Fu-hai (陳福海) and a KMT county councilor, Lee Ying-wen (李應文), jumped in at the last moment. 

​Rating: Safe KMT.  In the end, Yang will probably draw an independent challenger or two, and maybe the DPP will eventually find a sacrificial lamb. But with Chen Yu-chen endorsing him, and Chen Fu-hai staying on the sidelines this time, Yang has an easy path to reelection. 
Update 9.23: toss up. With Chen Fu-hai changing his mind, this is now a 3-way race. All three candidates are nominally KMT members, although Yang is the official nominee and the party is likely to suspend Chen and Lee's membership. As the incumbent, Yang probably has the edge, but he suddenly has a tough race on his hands.

KMT: The party apparently hasn't endorsed a candidate, instead letting two party members duke it out in the general: deputy magistrate Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) and Tsao Er-yuan (曹爾元) are both running.  
DPP: Nominated party chapter head Lii Wen (李問) on August 10.  
Others: None.
T-PVI: B+38
Notes:

• KMT incumbent magistrate Liu Cheng-ying (劉增應) is term-limited out, meaning this will be an open-seat contest.  
• Lienchiang County is the formal name for Matsu Island and a few other nearby islets under ROC jurisdiction. It's the smallest constituency in Taiwan by population: the electorate in 2018 was only  10,713 voters.
• The unusual development here is Lii Wen's willingness to take the plunge and run in the deepest of deep-blue counties. This is a long-term party-building mission for Lii.  

Rating: Safe KMT. The only question is which KMT member will win.

​KMT: Nominated former legislator Hsieh Kuo-liang (謝國樑) on May 26. 
DPP: Nominated legislator Tsai Shih-ying (蔡適應) on July 22. 
Others: The NPP has nominated a candidate for mayor here, city councilor Chen Wei-chung (陳薇仲). Independent candidate Huang Hsi-hsien (黃希賢) left the KMT in 2021. One other political novice registered -- a poet named Tseng Kuo-min (曾國民). 
T-PVI: B+7
Notes:

• This is one of the more interesting races in this cycle. Both major party candidates have held the Keelung legislative seat: Hsieh from 2008-2016, and Tsai from 2016-present.
• Keelung used to be reliably blue until 2016, when Tsai won the LY seat here in a major upset. He beat former Taipei mayor Hau Lung-bin, who parachuted in (and shoved aside Hsieh) because he thought it would be a relatively easy seat to win. Oops. 
• Keelung has had a DPP mayor for the last eight years, but it still leans blue, and the presence of an NPP candidate will probably hurt Tsai more. 
• Conversely, the KMT has suffered some really damaging intra-party splits here in the recent past, and Huang could steal some votes from Hsieh. Huang was a leading supporter of Han Kuo-yu in the 2020 presidential campaign, but has more recently also welcomed support from other parties and sought to position himself as part of a "Third Force" in Keelung.    
• Update 9.26: Popular incumbent DPP mayor Lin Yu-chang (林右昌) is taking a prominent role in Tsai Shih-ying's campaign to be his successor. 

Polls: 

• 2022.10.5-7: ​Hey, somebody finally polled Keelung! And it's TISR! Excellent. There's a lot to learn from this one. Headline number is Hsieh narrowly leading Tsai, 31-28%. The NPP's Chen Wei-chung is pulling 5%, with former KMT member Huang Hsi-hsien getting only 1%. Hsieh is getting about 80% of KMT supporters, and Huang only 3%. Among DPP partisans, Tsai is getting only 71%, Hsieh has 8% (!), and the NPP's Chen has 4%. Both camps are split here, but Hsieh appears to be doing better holding on to pan-blue voters than Tsai is pan-green. That might make the difference. I'm surprised the KMT renegade candidate Huang isn't registering any support in this poll. 

Rating: Leans KMT. On paper this looks like an even matchup, with both Tsai and Hsieh previously representing the city in the legislature, both moderates, and both relatively young (Tsai is 49, Hsieh is 46). Tsai won the LY seat here twice, but with only 41% in 2016 and 47% in 2020, when the DPP did very well nationally. With an NPP candidate in the race likely to pull some support away from the DPP, Tsai starts this campaign as the underdog.

KMT: Renominated incumbent county executive Lin Zi-miao (林姿妙).
DPP: Nominated Yilan City mayor Chiang Tsung-yuan (江聰淵).
Others: The TPP has nominated party caucus director Chen Wan-hui (陳琬惠) here. Update 9.2: Three others. 
T-PVI: G+6
Notes: 

• Yilan has traditionally been a DPP stronghold, and winning this office launched the political careers of prominent DPP leaders Chen Ding-nan (Minister of Justice during the Chen Shui-bian era) and You Si-kun (the current Speaker of the Legislative Yuan). Before Lin, the only KMT member to win here in the democratic era was Lu Kuo-hua (呂國華) in 2005. But the DPP entered the 2018 campaign divided: the party's nominee, Chen Ou-po (陳歐珀), was picked over the acting DPP magistrate, Chen Chin-te (陳金德), who himself was at odds with his DPP predecessor Lin Tsung-hsien (林聰賢), who had left to lead the Council of Agriculture. Chen Ou-pu never managed to unify the DPP base behind his candidacy, and Lin Zi-miao was the beneficiary. 
• In January 2022, prosecutors announced that Lin was under investigation for bribe-taking and other political corruption dating to her time as Luodong Township mayor. The KMT tried to paint these accusations as politically motivated, and Lin remains in the race. 
• Chiang Tsung-yuan is the two-term mayor of Yilan City, the county's most populous jurisdiction. 
• Chen was ranked 9th on the TPP's party list in 2020, not high enough to enter the legislature.
• Update 8.24: Lin Zi-miao, her daughter, 10 other county officials, and five other people have been formally indicted by Yilan County prosecutor's office for corruption, forgery, and money laundering. Lin is accused of accepting illegal payments when she was head of Luodong Township, and later as Yilan mayor helping to cover up illegal conversion of agricultural land to urban use. She says the charges are politically motivated and remains in the race.  

Polls: 

• 2022.10.11-15: RWNews online poll is rather surprising, given Lin's corruption charges: she is still comfortably ahead of Chiang, 53-31%, with the TPP's Chen at 5.5%. Yeesh. What a bad result for the DPP here.  
• 2022.10.19-21: Liberty Times with an in-house poll of this race, which finds a much closer race: Lin in the lead with 37% to Chiang's 30%, with the TPP's Chen at 4%. But Lin is still ahead even in this poll from an outfit with a strong green house effect. Not looking great for the DPP here a month out.  

Rating: Leans DPP. The DPP campaign here in 2018 was dragged down by infighting, and as a result the party lost an office they've held for most of the democratic era. With the KMT incumbent Lin wounded by corruption charges, and the long-time mayor of the largest city in the county challenging her, the DPP has a good opportunity to return this office to the green camp -- that is, if they've resolved whatever factional battles doomed them last time.
Update 10.26: Leans KMT. Recent polling indicates Lin is holding on despite the corruption charges, and Chiang hasn't made much progress here. I have no local knowledge about what is going on in this race, but if Chiang was going to consolidate the green camp behind him it should have happened by now. Two polls from very different outlets using different methods both find him stuck in the low 30s -- in Yilan! Lin Zi-miao is enjoying the advantages of incumbency, I guess? Rating change to Leans KMT.     

KMT: Nominated 6-term city councilor Lin Geng-ren (林耕仁) on June 22. 
DPP: Nominated deputy mayor Shen Hui-hung (沈慧虹), also on June 22. 
Others: The TPP has nominated party-list legislator Kao Hung-an 高虹安. The NPP may also field a candidate here. Update 9.2: In the end, the NPP did not endorse a candidate; 3 independents registered.
T-PVI: B+3
​Notes: 

• Incumbent mayor Lin Chih-chien was term-limited out. He resigned as mayor to take up the DPP's nomination for Taoyuan, then had to withdraw from that race on August 12.
• Shen is a career civil servant who joined the DPP only in June. She spent her career in the Taipei city government, working on transportation issues under both DPP (Chen Shui-bian) and KMT (Ma Ying-jeou and Hau Lung-bin) mayors. Lin Chih-chien appointed her head of the transportation department in Hsinchu in 2014, and deputy mayor in 2016.
• Both the NPP and TPP could play spoiler roles here; many Hsinchu voters have been willing to support third-party candidates in recent years. In 2016, the NPP fielded a candidate against the DPP's caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) in violation of its pre-electoral pact (Ker squeezed out a win anyway), and in 2020, the KMT candidate Cheng Cheng-ling (鄭正鈴) won here with only 37% of the vote when the DPP and NPP candidates split the rest. 
• The TPP's Kao is a party-list legislator without much of a public profile before 2020, but she's got a background that matches Hsinchu's high-tech aspirations: a PhD in mechanical engineering from an American university, and several years experience working at Foxconn (鴻海) as an aide to Terry Gou. This will be a test of whether the TPP can cultivate candidates who will emerge out of the shadow of Ko Wen-je and be competitive in local races.
• Update 10.26. The plagiarism accusations flying around in what seems like every race in Taiwan have now been hurled at both Kao and Lin as well. Kao seems more vulnerable because her campaign appeal is based in part on having an engineering PhD from an American university; the criticism is that she used materials from previous papers and a report she was lead author on in her dissertation without  proper attribution. Now the institute she worked for, the government-funded Institute for Information Industry, is suing her for improperly using their copyrighted materials in her dissertation. To my eyes this might be sloppy but it's not in the same category as copying someone else's work to get an MA degree, and it looks like a partisan hit job. 

Polls: 

• 2022.7.15-22: An early TVBS poll here finds a very close three-way race, with Lin at 27%, Kao at 26% (!), and Shen at 23%. That suggests Kao is a viable candidate here, and strategic voting might actually lead some green-leaning voters to abandon the DPP's Shen instead.   
• 2022.10.4-8: RWNews online poll shows a rather shocking turn here: Kao leads the race with 37%, with Shen at 30%, and Lin at 25%. 
• 2022.10.19-24: ETToday poll reports similars results as RWNews: Kao leads the race with 38%, to Shen's 32% and Lin way in back with 18%. If these latest polls are at all accurate, strategic voting appears more likely to hurt Lin than Shen. At the least it's clear Kao has a real shot to win, which is probably why the plagiarism attacks on her are so vicious.
  
• 2022.10.21-26: TVBS polls Hsinchu again, finds Kao Hung-an in the lead with 34% to Shen Hui-hung's 27% and Lin Geng-ren at 21%. If even TVBS with its strong blue house effect finds the KMT nominee Lin in 3rd place, then he's really in trouble. But it looks like Kao rather than Shen is the primary beneficiary. I tend to be skeptical of polls that show third-party candidates doing this well, since voters have a tendency to drift back toward their partisan leanings as Election Day approaches. We'll see if Kao can maintain her lead for the next month.      

Rating: Leans KMT. Hsinchu used to be reliably blue but has trended toward the DPP since 2014: Tsai Ing-wen won a majority here in both 2016 and 2020, and Ker Chien-ming, the DPP's party caucus whip, held this seat from 2016-2020. Shen, however, is not a high-profile candidate and has never run for office before. The KMT used internal polls to decide on Lin, who has been a Hsinchu councilor since 1998.
​Update 10.26: Toss-Up. Kao is clearly competitive here, and her candidacy seems to be pulling more support from the blue than green camp. Still a month to go, but this race could break toward any of the three main candidates now. It's certainly not looking great for Lin and the KMT...Rating change to Toss-Up.   

KMT: Renominated incumbent Yang Wen-ke (楊文科).
DPP: Nominated Chou Chiang-chieh (周江杰) on August 8. 
Others: Chubei mayor Ho Kan-ming (何淦銘) declared his own candidacy in June and tried without success to convince the DPP to back him. Update 9.23: Ho pulled out of the race at the last moment; 3 other independents registered.     
T-PVI: B+12
Notes: 

• Yang held off a stiff challenge here in 2018 from another pan-blue candidate, Hsu Hsin-ying (徐欣瑩) of the Minkuotang (民國黨). Despite the pan-blue split, the DPP couldn't steal this one; Yang won 38% of the vote to Hsu's 32% and DPP candidate Cheng Chao-fang's (鄭朝方) 28%. 
• Chou was a county councilor for one term (2014-17) as a Taiwan Green Party member, then was recruited into the DPP to lead the party's Hakka Affairs Department. His recent career illustrates the DPP's willingness to co-opt energetic "third force" activists into the party; other examples include Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) and Fan Yun (范雲).  
• Ho is an independent who has cooperated with the DPP in the past, winning the Chubei mayor's race twice with backing from the party. This time around, the DPP's central nomination committee made a decision here to nominate one of their own rather than support an independent challenge to Yang; that decision probably assures Yang of victory. 
• Update 9.23. I missed earlier that Ho announced he would not run on the day of the Sept 2 registration deadline. He also declined to endorse the DPP candidate Chou here, and instead pledged to work to elect Kuo Han-chang (郭漢章) as his successor in Chubei. That makes the county race close to a straight-up green-blue two-way contest now. None of the other three candidates have much of a public profile.       

Polls: 

• 2022.10.4-8: RWNews online poll finds Yang leading Chou, 45-30%. Some weakness in that number for Yang (an incumbent under 50% is usually a warning sign), but he's still way ahead.   

Rating: Likely KMT. The DPP is so weak in Hsinchu County, the question is usually not whether the DPP candidates will win (they won't), but whether they will run at all. An independent with DPP backing could give the official KMT nominee a competitive race, as happened in both 2014 and 2018.  
Update 9.23: Safe KMT. With Ho not running and no other prominent pan-blue candidates registering, this race is now effectively a one-on-one contest between a KMT incumbent facing a young, untested DPP nominee in a deep blue county. There's a plausible scenario in which Yang could have lost this election, but this is not it. Rating change to Safe KMT. 

KMT: Initially announced Legislator Hsu Chih-jung (徐志榮) as the nominee on May 14. But Hsu didn't want to run, and on June 29 he was replaced by Hsieh Fu-hung (謝福弘). 
DPP: Nominated Hsu Ting-chen (徐定禎) on April 27. 
Others: KMT member Chung Tung-chin (鐘東錦) declared he would defy the party leadership and run as an independent shortly after Hsieh's nomination was announced. The NPP has also nominated a candidate here, Song Kuo-ting (宋國鼎). One other independent candidate. 
T-PVI: B+11
Notes: 

• Hsieh's entire career has been in the Irrigation Association of Miaoli County. He lost his position at the head of that organization after the DPP passed a bill in 2020 turning all association positions into appointed positions rather than elected ones. 
• Chung Tung-chin is the Miaoli County Council Speaker, and he has a colorful past.
• The DPP's nominee Hsu is the former mayor of Toufen, a moderate-sized town.  
• The NPP tried to get the DPP to forego nominating a candidate here and instead to back their own member, Song Kuo-ting, the party's only county councilor. The DPP refused, and now there's a four-way race. 
• Update 9.8. The KMT has now expelled Chung Tung-chin from the party. Hsieh Fu-hung is gamely trying to rally the KMT base back behind his candidacy. 

Polls: 

• 2022.7.5-9: A very early online poll from RWNews found Chung leading the pack, with 38% to the DPP's Hsu with 19%, the NPP's Song with 16%, and Hsieh in a weak 4th place with 12%. 
  
• 2022.10.26: For a race that's so colorful it's frustrating there still do not seem to be any good recent polls of Miaoli. So I'm going to mention the results of a poll from something called the Asia Pacific Elite Exchange Association (?) here, which got a writeup in Newtalk news. They show a four way race, with KMT renegade Chung at 22%, the DPP's nominee Hsu at 21%, the NPP's Song at 11.5%, and the KMT nominee Hsieh all the way down at 7%. That seems improbably low for a KMT candidate in Miaoli. But, combined with lots of political reporting suggesting Hsieh is a really weak candidate, that's enough to change this to a toss-up.   
  

Rating: Leans KMT. Heavily Hakka, this is one of the bluest counties in mainland Taiwan and should be an easy hold for the KMT. But not this time: the party's nomination strategy here really blew up in their faces with Hsu's public refusal and the challenge from Chung, and local media are calling this a "train wreck" for the KMT. The DPP-NPP rivalry may be a lower-profile problem but it also probably dooms either candidate's chances. As the renegade KMT candidate in a four-way race, Chung has a decent shot.   
Update 10.26: Toss-up. The renegade candidate Chung still seems to be a serious threat to win this. In the absence of good polling data and with all four candidates apparently still viable, rating change to Toss-Up.  

KMT: Nominated legislator Hsu Shu-hua (許淑華) on May 26. (Not to be confused with Taipei City DPP councilor Hsu Shu-hua (also written 許淑華 in Chinese.))
DPP: Nominated former party-list legislator Frida Tsai (蔡培慧) on March 29.
Others: One independent, county councilor Wang Yung-ching (王永慶).   
T-PVI: B+5
Notes: 

• ​KMT incumbent Lin Ming-chen (林明溱) is term-limited out, so this is an open-seat race.
• Hsu has racked up impressive wins in Nantou 2, which at the presidential level is competitive and the "greener" of Nantou's two LY districts -- Tsai Ing-wen carried it in both 2016 and 2020, while Hsu won 57-43% in 2016 and 55-41% in 2020. Before winning a legislative by-election in 2015, Hsu was the mayor of Nantou City (2006-2014), and before that a county councilor (2002-2006). 
• Frida Tsai is a leader of the Taiwan Rural Front (台灣農村陣線), an NGO working to prevent agricultural land expropriation. She's one of several candidates with a social activist background who Tsai Ing-wen placed on the DPP's party list in 2016, and she subsequently served a term in the LY. In 2020, she ran against Ma Wen-chun in Nantou 1, losing 53.6-46.4%.  
• Tsai was raised in Nantou but moved to Taipei as a teenager, then earned a Ph.D. from NTU in bio-industrial communication. 
• Update 8.15. Hsu has submitted a request to Feng-chia University to have her own MA thesis examined for plagiarism; result will be known in October. She appears to be worried about attacks like those that forced Lin Chih-chien out of the Taoyuan race.
• Update 10.26. Frida Tsai has accused the incumbent county executive Lin Ming-chen of vote-buying, in the form of passing out noodle bowls during his "farewell tour." Lin is openly campaigning for Hsu.
  
• Update 11.3. At a campaign rally, Tsai Ing-wen explicitly accuses Hsu Shu-hua of being "involved with powerful local gangsters" and coming from a political family with a history of "black gold" politics. Hsu was accused in 2012 of paying ward chiefs in Nantou to buy votes, but was never charged. The DPP appears to be focusing more on the political corruption angle in recent days as their candidates have struggled to gain traction against KMT incumbents. In some ways this election cycle feels like a throwback to the 1990s. 

Rating: likely KMT. Hsu is a formidable candidate; given her past experience and her performance in recent LY elections, she looks hard to beat here unless (and maybe even if) the plagiarism rumors are confirmed. Nantou also has tended to exhibit a strong "native son/daughter" tendency in voting patterns, and Hsu's clearly got the edge over Tsai there as well. 

KMT: Renominated incumbent Wang Huei-mei (王惠美). 
DPP: Nominated legislator legislator Huang Shiou-fang (黃秀芳) on June 28. 
​Others: One minor candidate. 
T-PVI: Even
​Notes:

• Wang was a two-term legislator representing Changhua 1 when she ran for magistrate in 2018, and she crushed the DPP incumbent Wei Ming-ku (魏明谷) 53-40%. Before that, she demonstrated some real political talent and resilience in pulling out a victory in a three-way race in 2012 over two candidates from powerful political families in the county, Chen Chin-ting (陳進丁) and Lin Yi-pang (林益邦). She got her start in politics as mayor of Lukang, an old port town that's now a popular tourist attraction.    
• Huang is no slouch herself, winning close races in Changhua 2 in 2016 and 2020. But she's spent less time holding office in the county than Wang. 
• Much like Taichung, Changhua County is a swing region at the presidential level, but factional politics and political dynasties also run deep here. Wang's approval ratings put her in the middle of the pack among mayors and county executives. 

Polls: 

• 2022.9.20-24: RWNews with an online poll that finds Wang way ahead of Huang, 55% to 29%. Likely to tighten somewhat but Wang looks in good shape here so far.  

Rating: Leans KMT. As in 2018, KMT appears to be united behind Wang's candidacy, and there are no prominent independents in the race, so this is an even-strength contest. Like Taichung, my prior here is that the incumbent starts with an advantage, but the national political environment may be decisive: if it's neutral or worse for the DPP, then Wang wins. If it instead turns out to be a green year, Huang is a strong enough candidate to pull off the upset.   

Taiwan's local elections will be held this year on Saturday, November 26, the date set by the Central Election Commission. Altogether, nine different types of offices are up for election:

• (1) Mayors and (2) city councilors in centrally-administered municipalities (直轄市市長，市議員) for Taipei, Kaohsiung, New Taipei City, Taichung, Tainan, and Taoyuan);
• (3) Executives and (4) councilors in counties and county-level municipalities (縣／省轄市長，縣／市議員);
• (5) Township and town heads and (6) councilors (鄉／鎮長，鄉／鎮議員); 
• (7) Village and ward heads (村／里長).
• (8) Indigenous "self-governing" district heads and (9) representatives (自治區長，區代表). 

Since 2014, these elections have all been held concurrently on a four-year cycle. The local elections in 2022 are the only island-wide ones to be held between the 2020 and 2024 general elections for president and the legislature. That makes these something like midterm elections in the United States: in addition to deciding who governs across all of Taiwan's localities, they also are an important bellwether for trends in party politics. In 2014, the DPP flipped seven of the county and city executives, providing the first concrete indication that it could surpass the KMT and sweep to victory in 2016. In 2018, the KMT returned the favor, flipping nine local mayors including an astonishing upset victory by Han Kuo-yu in Kaohsiung; Han's victory set off a politically volatile period in Taiwan politics that concluded only with Tsai Ing-wen's equally astonishing comeback and emphatic reelection in January 2020. 

In an important shift, this time around both major parties have mostly done away with the party member votes and polling primaries that they had used over the past several election cycles to choose their nominees for city and county executives. Instead, the party chair --Tsai Ing-wen for the DPP, Eric Chu for the KMT -- is playing a decisive role in "negotiating" the nominees in each locality. (As this post from Nathan Batto details, both major parties have become more skeptical about the value of using polls to decide nominees after the 2020 election cycle.) The DPP has had considerable success using this method of negotiation in the past, but the KMT has typically struggled to work out side deals in the same way and suffered lots of intra-party splits as a result. A key concern for both, then, will be keeping disgruntled party members who were denied a nomination from running anyway as independents, or not campaigning to elect the party's official candidates. 

Now that the candidates for most of these races have been chosen, I am going to keep notes here on the nominees for each executive race, along with whatever other tidbits might be relevant, and try to give some context for what to expect. To keep this manageable, I've broken this discussion into three parts. Today's post has an overview of the highest-profile races in the six special municipalities (直轄市): Taipei, New Taipei, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan, and Kaohsiung. Later I'll break down the county-level executive races in north and central Taiwan, and then follow with the south, east, and offshore islands.

Update 8.27. I've added in a rough estimate of the partisan leaning of each locality. Following the Partisan Voting Index (PVI) developed by the Cook Political Report for elections in the United States, I've called this the Taiwan Partisan Voting Index (T-PVI). To calculate T-PVI, I averaged the DPP presidential vote share in each jurisdiction over the last two presidential elections (in 2016 and 2020), then took the difference between the national and local vote share. B+1 means the city or county is one point bluer (i.e. less favorable to the DPP) than the national electorate. G+1 means it is one point greener (more favorable to the DPP.) By this measure, the "bluest" locality in Taiwan is Lienchiang County, at B+38, and the "greenest" is Tainan at G+11. Of Taiwan's 22 localities, 14 are bluer than average, 7 are greener, and one (Changhua County) is even. So, in a national political environment where the blue and green camps are running even, the blue side should be favored to win 14 localities to the green side's 7.

Update 9.20. The latest TFOP poll shows Tsai Ing-wen's approval rating dropping to 43.8% in September, the lowest monthly rating since June 2021, and near the lowest point of her second term. The national environment for the DPP doesn't look as favorable as it did two months ago.

Update 10.26. October TFOP poll is out and shows Tsai Ing-wen's approval rating bouncing back up to 51.2%, and generic identification with the DPP jumping up from 22.4% to 33.5%. That increase might (?) be related to the attention on the CCP 20th Party Congress, where Xi Jinping secured a third term as party secretary and stacked the Standing Committee of the Politburo with his own loyalists. Regardless, that's a big improvement for the DPP in the last month before the elections. 

KMT: Nominated Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) on May 25.
DPP: Nominated Chen Shih-chung (陳時中) on July 10.
Others: Deputy mayor Huang Shan-shan (黃珊珊) declared as an independent candidate on August 28. Former Tainan County magistrate Su Huan-chih (蘇煥) announced on July 29 he's running as an independent. 8 others also registered by the September 2 deadline. 
T-PVI: B+2
Notes:

• Chiang is a 2nd-term legislator representing Taipei 3, and the son of John Chang --> Chiang (章孝嚴 --> 蔣孝嚴), who has claimed to be an illegitimate child of Chiang Ching-kuo and in the 2000s changed the family name to make the claim explicit. Chiang Wan-an is 43 -- young by KMT standards -- and, given his father's long career in KMT politics and ostensible connection to CCK, is KMT royalty. His father held the same district from 2008-2012. 
• Chiang has twice won tough races for the legislature in Taipei 3, 47-38-12% in 2016, and 51-46% in 2020, while running well ahead of the KMT presidential ticket; Tsai Ing-wen carried the district with 52% of the vote in 2016, and 53.4% in 2020. 
• Chen headed the Ministry of Health and Welfare and also the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) during the pandemic. He became a household name through daily press conferences leading Taiwan's COVID response, but he has never before run for elected office.
• Incumbent Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) is term-limited out. Ko won this race in 2014 with the DPP's backing. In 2018, he barely won a three-way contest by less than 4000 votes when the DPP instead nominated its own candidate, Yao Wen-chih (姚文智).
• Ko appears to want his deputy mayor Huang Shan-shan (黃珊珊) to run as a candidate of the TPP. She has publicly expressed interest in running, although she hasn't joined the party (she's still a PFP member) and hasn't yet announced.
• Su Huan-chih (蘇煥智), who was the DPP magistrate of Tainan County from 2001-2010, has also registered to run. He ran for party chair in 2012, losing to Su Tseng-chang. Since then he's been marginalized within the party and has become a critic of Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP leadership. He left the party and ran for mayor in Tainan in 2018 as an independent, but won only 4.1% of the vote there. 
• Update 8.28: Huang Shan-shan has officially declared she's in the race. Taiwan media are now calling this a "tripod" (三腳督) election.  
• Update 9.15: Su Huan-chih complains that TV networks are focusing on only the top three candidates and ignoring his campaign. He says he will sue the National Communications Commission for not forcing news media to cover the candidates "fairly," citing Articles 49 and 104 of the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act. The NCC (rightly in my view) responds by saying they're not going to dictate how networks should cover the campaigns. For background on the NCC, see here. For more on the regulation of elections in Taiwan, see this working paper.   

Polls:

• 2022.6.24: TVBS poll of Taipei mayor options. Data here show Huang Shan-shan pulling more support from the pan-green than pan-blue camp: only 62% of DPP partisans favor Chen Shih-chung and 22% favor Huang Shan-shan,  while 86% of KMT partisans favor Chiang Wan-an and only 9% favor Huang. For NPP partisans (only 3% of sample), 39% favor Huang,  28% favor Chen, and 27% favor Chiang. 
• 2022.8.22-26: TVBS poll taken just before Huang Shan-shan enters the race. Chiang Wan-an leads with 36%, Huang (!) is second with 26%, and Chen is third at 23%. The poll also finds ~50% of respondents have a favorable impression of Chiang and Huang, with Chen well back at only 29%, and 52% unfavorable. 
• 2022.8.31-9.3: Liberty Times poll taken just after Huang enters the race. Good illustration of "house effects" here: LTN is a green paper, and their poll shows Chen leading Chiang and Huang, 30-23-21%, in contrast to TVBS's much "bluer" results. Unfortunate that LTN, unlike TVBS, does not put up the full read-out of questions and methodology. I'll note the result here since it's a paper of record, but caveat emptor...
• 2022.9.13-17: RWNews online poll shows a virtual tie, with Chiang at 35.2%, Chen at 35.0%, and Huang at 24.8%.  
• 2022.9.29-30: TVBS poll finds Chiang still in lead: 40% to Chen's 22%, and Huang's 23%. Notable that Huang is not only viable but also potentially ahead of Chen. The partisan breakdown in this poll shows Huang still pulling about 20% of DPP and 42% of NPP, but only 7% of KMT partisans. Chiang appears to be keeping KMT voters firmly behind him.
• 2022.10.4-5: ETToday poll finds Chiang in lead, 40% to Chen's 27%, with Huang slightly back at 23%. Given polling margin of error, this is entirely consistent with the earlier TVBS polls of the race.
• 2022.10.5-6: My-Formosa poll finds Huang rising since the last time they polled this to overtake Chen, with Chiang still in the lead: 29.6%, to 28.1% for Huang, and 27.8% for Chen. Still a true three-cornered race. The results here are quite detailed and, as this writeup notes, show better favorability ratings for Huang and Chiang than Chen. 
• 2022.10.27-29: TVBS poll shows Chiang still leading at 37% to Chen's 27%, and Huang in the rear at 21%. Some clear divergence from other polls in the last month that show Huang moving up.
  
• 2022.11.1-5: Another poll shows Huang losing ground. RWNews online poll finds Chiang at 36%, Chen at 33%, and Huang at 28%. Some speculation in the accompanying article that partisans are drifting back to their respective blue and green camps, and swing voters are abandoning Huang to vote strategically for one of the other two.   

Rating: Leans KMT. Given his family background and relative youth, Chiang is the kind of candidate who can unite the party's fractious wings and appeal to the old guard of the KMT without alienating light blue and swing voters. Chen Shih-chung looked formidable as of a year ago but has seen his approval ratings decline as Taiwan has shifted away from a zero-COVID strategy. More relevant is that he's completely untested in electoral politics. A national poll from TPOF in July found more Taiwanese opposed (40.2%) than supported (37.6%) his decision to run for mayor.

It's hard to say what effect Huang would have on the race -- the TPP under Ko has moved toward the bluer end of the political spectrum, so my prior before seeing any polls was that her presence would hurt Chiang more. But Ko Wen-je also won two terms as mayor by appealing to young, green-leaning and independent voters; if Huang is able to draw support from these same blocs, as some polls are showing she might, perhaps it's Chen Shih-chung who is hurt more. At this point, with Huang not even formally in the race yet, my guess is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

KMT: Renominated incumbent mayor Hou You-yi (sometimes spelled Hou Yu-yih 侯友宜). 
DPP: Nominated Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) on July 10. 
Others: None.
T-PVI: B+2
Notes: 

• Hou has consistently polled among the most popular of Taiwan's local mayors over the past four years, and looks well-positioned to win re-election. He also looks like the strongest candidate the KMT could run in the 2024 presidential election; the outcome here could go a long way toward determining whether Hou actually declares for that race next year.
• Lin was mayor of Taichung for one term, then after being defeated for reelection in 2018 became the Minister of Transport and Communications in the Tsai administration. He resigned from that office in April 2021 after a Taroko Express train derailed in Hualien, killing 49 people.    
• The DPP took a long time to select a candidate here. Legislator Lo Chih-cheng announced on July 3 that he had been asked to run but was going to turn down the nomination because the party had delayed the announcement for too long. 
• ​New Taipei is the only special municipality the DPP has never won; the current premier Su Tseng-chang was the last member of the party to win an election here, way back in 2001 when it was still Taipei County. It is now Taiwan's most populous jurisdiction, with over four million people. 

Polls:

• 2022.9.13-17: RWNews online poll shows Hou leading Lin, 58-36%. 
• 2022.9.21-23: Liberty Times finds Hou leading Lin 52-22%. The usual complaints about lack of transparency in LTN's methodology apply here (e.g. how'd they weight their sample?); even so, coming from a polling outfit with a consistently green house effect, that's a huge lead for Hou.
• 2022.10.14-17:  ETToday poll shows Hou leading Lin 55-32%. Not a whole lot of movement in this one; partisans sticking with their camp's candidate, and Hou winning all the rest.  

Rating: Likely KMT. Hou is a popular incumbent running against a recycled DPP candidate with no previous base in the city. He should win comfortably. A defeat for Hou here would signal absolute disaster for the KMT's fortunes. Conversely, if Hou wins big here while KMT candidates falter everywhere else, it's going to be very hard for the KMT not to nominate him for president. To me the results in Xinbei, not Taipei, will hold the greatest national political implications. 

KMT: Nominated Simon Chang (Chang San-cheng 張善政), the party's 2020 VP candidate and former premier for a brief period at the end of the Ma administration. 
DPP: Nominated Lin Chih-chien (林智堅), the incumbent mayor of Hsinchu City; Lin withdrew from the race on August 12, and the DPP announced legislator Cheng Yun-peng (鄭運鵬) would run instead.  
Others: Lai Hsiang-ling (賴香伶), a TPP party-list legislator, is also running. Former DPP legislator Cheng Pao-ching (鄭寶清) declared on August 27. No others. 
T-PVI: B+4
Notes: 

• Popular incumbent Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) of the DPP is term-limited out. He's a potential candidate for president in 2024. 
• Both major parties nominated surprise candidates here, and both are now politically damaged. Chang was hand-picked by party chairman Eric Chu, apparently without consultation with local party power-brokers or legislators in the city who were blindsided by the decision. Chu also ignored strident appeals from Lo Chih-chiang, a former Ma administration spokesman and Taipei city councilor, who resigned his councilor seat and publicly declared he was running after Chu told him that he was not going to be nominated. 
• On the DPP side, the party dithered for a while before announcing that Lin, who is term-limited out in nearby Hsinchu City, would parachute in to run here. That seemed to be a safe (if uninspired) choice, and a way to help Lin (who is relatively young, at 47) keep his career in local politics going. But then some intrepid opponent researchers dug up credible evidence that Lin had plagiarized both of his master's theses, the first at Chung Hua University in 2008, and the second at National Taiwan University in 2017, submitted when he was already mayor of Hsinchu. 
• The pan-blue media has relentlessly hammered on these accusations, partly because the KMT's own candidate in the Kaohsiung by-election in 2020 to replace Han Kuo-yu, Li Mei-jhen (李眉蓁), was also accused of plagiarism and had to renounce her MA degree. It doesn't exactly help the DPP that Lin's thesis advisor was Chen Ming-tong, now the director-general of the National Security Bureau in the Tsai administration. 
• A twist here is that none of the three candidates has much previous connection to Taoyuan (all three have had to relocate their household registration to the city after entering the race). That may not matter much since many voters are also new to Taoyuan -- the city has grown more than any other municipality over the last decade and is now more populous than Taipei.  
• Update 8.12: Lin Chih-chien withdrew from the race on 8.12; the DPP immediately announced legislator Cheng Yun-peng (鄭運鵬) would replace him. Cheng is the DPP's party caucus secretary in the Legislative Yuan and represents Taoyuan 1. He's won twice in a competitive district: 47-44% in 2016, and 46-43% in 2020. 
• Update 8.27: Another bad development here for the DPP: the former DPP legislator Cheng Pao-ching (鄭寶清) has announced he'll run as an independent for Taoyuan mayor. Part of his justification is that Cheng Yun-peng showed bad judgement by staunchly defending Lin in the thesis scandal. Cheng Pao-ching represented Taoyuan 4 from 2016-20 (a seat he won by only 160 votes), then narrowly lost reelection to current KMT legislator Wan Mei-ling (萬美玲) in 2020.
• Update 9.2: Now Simon Chang is facing his own plagiarism charges, although the context is quite different. Chang worked at the computer manufacturer Acer from 2007-09, and he led a research team that got a large grant (~US$1.9 million) from the Council of Agriculture (awarded toward the end of the Chen Shui-bian administration -- so this was not a political handout from the KMT government that followed, although it's sometimes being characterized that way) to write a series of reports on enhancing e-commerce for Taiwan's agricultural sector. The published collection contains many passages that were copied without proper citation. 

Polls: 

• 2022.8.15-16: TVBS poll finds Chang leading Cheng Yun-peng and Lai Hsiang-ling, 39-28-8%, with 25% undecided. 
• 2022.8.23-25: ETToday poll shows Chang leading Cheng Yun-peng, 39-26%, with Lai at 11%. 
• 2022.9.1-9.8: TVBS poll shows Chang leading the pack again with 36%, despite the COA report news breaking at the beginning of this survey period; Cheng Yun-peng has 27%, Cheng Pao-ching 8%, and Lai at only 5%. The Cheng-on-Cheng intra-DPP split looks bad for the party's chances here. The TPP's Lai apparently hasn't gotten any traction so far despite the face-plants by both major parties.
• 2022.9.14-16: Liberty Times poll (again, methodology caveats aside) finds Cheng Yun-peng in the lead, barely, over Chang: 29-25%, with 7% for Cheng Pao-ching, and 5% for Lai. 35% of those polled were undecided. Take the blue and green pollster results together and they suggest a two-man race but with a lot of voters up for grabs. 
• 2022.10.16-20: TVBS polls Taoyuan again, finds the race almost unchanged. Chang is holding his lead, 38-27% over Cheng Yun-peng, with Cheng Pao-ching at 6%, and Lai at 5%. 24% undecided.
• 2022.10.25-29: RWNews online poll shows Simon Chang in the lead over Cheng Yun-peng 46-41%. Compared to their previous polls, voters seem to be abandoning both Cheng Pao-ching and Lai Hsiang-ling and shifting toward one of the top two. A straight-up green-vs-blue race is better for the DPP, since they've got a very popular incumbent mayor and Taoyuan has trended green in recent years. But Cheng Yun-peng still appears to be behind.  

Rating: Toss-up. The KMT's nomination process here was Not Great; they passed over two Taoyuan legislators to nominate Chang, and it's going to be a struggle for the party to get all the local KMT politicos to line up behind him. But the DPP's decision to nominate Lin is also not looking so hot now, either. Lin is a newcomer to Taoyuan, too, and the plagiarism accusations may also be taking a toll on his appeal -- the most recent news is that an NTU committee found the accusations credible and has recommended his degree be rescinded. Given the stumbles in both blue and green camps, Lai Hsiang-ling of the centrist TPP could actually have a shot here, or at least a chance to play spoiler. 
Update 8.12: At this point, replacing Lin with Cheng probably helps the DPP. At the least, Cheng is from Taoyuan, and the switch happened early enough that he should be able to run a competitive campaign. The controversy over Lin's plagiarism cases was becoming a huge distraction for the party.  
​Update 8.27: Cheng Pao-ching's entry into the race complicates what has already become a difficult election for the DPP here. With the TPP's Lai not getting much traction in polls, Chang San-cheng now appears to have the edge.  
Update 10.26: Leans KMT. A month out from the election, and Simon Chang keeps holding on to a significant lead in polls, although well short of 50%. The TPP's Lai hasn't made any headway, so this is trending in the opposite direction from Hsinchu City with the KMT the likely beneficiary of strategic voting, while Cheng Pao-ching appears to be pulling enough of the vote to doom Cheng Yun-peng. Rating change to Leans KMT.   

KMT: Renominated incumbent mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕).
DPP: Nominated legislator and deputy LY speaker Tsai Chi-chang (蔡其昌) on April 27.
Others: A third candidate, Chen Mei-fei (陳美妃) registered on the last day to run as an independent.
T-PVI: B+1
Notes:

• Lu was previously a legislator (and a rival of former KMT chair and Taichung legislator Johnny Chiang 江啟臣), who barely edged out Chiang for the party's nomination here in 2018, then won a surprisingly large victory over Lin Chia-lung in the 2018 general election. Her approval ratings have lagged toward the bottom of all mayors around Taiwan, but she remains a formidable candidate--this TVBS poll (admittedly a blue news outlet with a consistently strong house effect in its polls) shows her with a 55-22% lead over Tsai at the end of June.
• Tsai has represented Taichung's 1st district since 2012, and became deputy speaker in 2016. He is close to a generic replacement-level DPP candidate but could probably win if it's a strong DPP year.
• Taichung has been a microcosm of national vote patterns over the last several election cycles. Lin Chia-lung won here in 2014 57-43%, and then Lu won it back for the KMT in 2018, also 57-43%. In between, Tsai Ing-wen won 45% of the vote in Taichung in 2012, 55% of the vote in 2016, and 57% in 2020: very close to her overall performance in each of those elections.
• Update 9.2. The independent candidate here, Chen Mei-fei, is unusual: she is a political novice (政治素人) not backed by any political group, and she apparently used her own personal savings to pay the NT$1.5 million deposit (about US$48,000 at current exchange rates). The Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (Article 32) requires that candidates must obtain ≥ 10% of the winning vote share in order to have their deposits refunded after the election. So, Chen risks forfeiting this registration deposit unless she wins ≥5% of the vote.  

Polls: 

• 2022.9.8-14: ETToday poll shows Lu leading Tsai 54-33%. 
• 2022.9.13-15: Formosa News with a detailed poll on the Taichung race. Among many findings here, Lu leads Tsai 59-20%. Also asks a more generic question about whether to switch parties or stick with KMT leader: that is in KMT's favor by a smaller margin, 54-25%. 
• 2022.9.22-26: TISR (thrilled to see them back in the polling business) has a new high-quality poll out on Taichung. It shows Lu leading Tsai 50-20% (!). Yikes. Lu's trust and approval ratings are over 70% in this poll. If that's close to accurate, she's going to be hard to beat. 

Rating: Leans KMT. This is another race to watch as a bellwether for national trends. As the incumbent, Lu starts out with some advantages, but she's not Hou: her personal appeal and networks aren't going to carry her to victory in a down year. My prior here is that the result will be driven by national trends rather than local issues and candidate quality. If it's a pro-DPP election nationally, Lu is in trouble. If it's not, she probably wins.
Update 10.26: Likely KMT. A month out from Election Day and this race hasn't moved much. Lu is looking much more popular, and Tsai worse, than I expected in August. Polls keep showing this race to be more like the KMT's version of Tainan or Kaohsiung than a swing city. Rating change to Likely KMT. 

KMT: Nominated city councilor Hsieh Lung-chieh (謝龍介) on March 23. 
DPP: Renominated incumbent Huang Wei-che (黃偉哲) (sometimes spelled Huang Wei-cher). 
Others: Hsu Chung-hsin (許忠信), a former TSU legislator, has entered the race as an independent. Three others, including 2018 candidate Lin Yi-feng (林義豐).
​T-PVI: G+11
Notes: 

• The KMT has never won here since Tainan City and County were merged into a special municipality in 2010. Ma Ying-jeou actually carried Tainan City in 2008 (isn't that amazing?), but since the merger with deep green Tainan County, KMT candidates face a near-hopeless task trying to compete here. 
• Even so, Huang Wei-che had an unexpectedly close race on his hands in 2018. Although he was the DPP's official nominee in a deep green city, four independent candidates pulled almost 30 percent of the vote, and he won with only 38% support. Huang appears to have been caught up in pan-green infighting in Tainan, which has been unusually public and acrimonious for several years now.  
• The 32.4% the previous KMT candidate got here in 2018 in a strongly anti-DPP year is probably an absolute ceiling for the party. For the KMT to win in Tainan now looks like it would require a perfect split of the vote among green candidates, or supporting a DPP factional leader as their nominee. If there's one place where it makes sense for the KMT to forego nominating anyone at all and trying instead to back an anti-DPP independent, Tainan is it.

Polls: 

• 2022.9.23-29: ETToday poll shows Huang leading Hsieh, 50-29%. Everyone else is under 5%. 
• 2022.10.18-22: RWNews online poll (see Chiayi City poll section for more details) has Huang ahead but not by a lot: 44% to Hsieh's 36%. Nobody else is polling more than 5%. For an incumbent mayor in a deep green city, Huang is coming in well below expectations in this poll. 

Rating: Safe DPP. Huang's renomination by the DPP should ensure his election even if his Tainan rivals remain disgruntled and independents pull some of the pan-green vote away from him. 

KMT: ​Nominated former legislator Ko Chih-en (柯志恩) on June 29.  
DPP: Renominated incumbent mayor Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁). 
Others: Two independent candidates.
T-PVI: G+6
Notes:   

• Ko is a faculty member at Tamkang University in Tamsui, New Taipei. Her father Ko Wen-fu (柯文福) was magistrate of Pingtung County from 1973-1981, so she comes from a political family. In 2016, she was ranked second on the KMT's party list, ensuring her a seat for the 2016-2020 term. [correction 9.23]: In 2020 she ran for the LY in New Taipei 7, losing 46-40% to Lo Chih-cheng, then returned to teaching. She has also headed the KMT's National Policy Foundation. She moved her household registration from New Taipei to Kaohsiung for this election. 
• Chen Chi-mai has already had a long career in the DPP, serving as a legislator, acting mayor of Kaohsiung, EY spokesman, and deputy secretary-general of the presidential office. His shocking loss to Han Kuo-yu in 2018 did not ultimately set back his political ambitions much; he was instead elevated to the central government where he served as vice premier before returning to contest the by-election after Han's recall in June 2020. 
• Chen is the son of Chen Che-nan (陳哲男), a KMT-turned-DPP legislator in the 1990s who later served as a close aide to Chen Shui-bian in the Presidential Office. After Chen Shui-bian left office, Chen Che-nan was convicted and served three years in prison on bribery charges.     

Polls: 

• 2022.9.28-30:  ETToday poll shows Chen leading Ko 54-31%. Within the range of expectations but I'm a bit surprised Ko is polling that well. Perhaps she's more appealing to pan-blue voters than I thought. 

Rating: Safe DPP. Han Kuo-yu pulled off a miracle by winning in Kaohsiung in 2018--a feat that nobody thought was possible in a city that's been a DPP bastion for more than two decades. But the "Han craze" is much diminished now, since he lost the 2020 presidential election and was then recalled by Kaohsiung voters in June 2020. Chen Chi-mai easily won the subsequent by-election and is well-placed for reelection. 

This coming week is the 4th World Congress of Taiwan Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle campus. WCTS is the seminal gathering of academics and practitioners working in the Taiwan studies field. The first meeting was in 2012 in Taipei at Academia Sinica, the second in 2015 in London, and the third also at Academia Sinica in 2018. This meeting has been delayed a year because of the COVID pandemic -- well worth the wait, however, because we actually get to do this in person. For many of us this will be the first time seeing each other in almost three years. 

On Monday, June 27 I'm going to be presenting a new paper at the WCTS that attempts to evaluate the quality of democracy in Taiwan. The initial inspiration for this research was a talk that Larry Diamond gave in 2001, which provides a very useful snapshot of Taiwan's democratic strengths and weaknesses. Diamond highlighted five problem areas: 

1. Political corruption and "black gold" (黑金) politics
2. Weak rule of law, including insufficient judicial independence and professionalism and widespread distrust of the courts
3. Growing partisan polarization, especially around national identity (Taiwanese vs Chinese) and ethnicity (benshengren vs waishengren)
4. Constitutional defects, including ambiguity over whether Taiwan is a presidential or semi-presidential system, and a problematic electoral system (SNTV).
5. Weak support for democratic values among the mass public. 

Twenty years later, it is fascinating to look back on this catalog of serious problems and consider how much things have changed, often in ways that are imperceptible or under-appreciated by Taiwanese themselves. In the paper, I make the case that Taiwan's political system has undergone significant improvements in all five of these areas. I won't repeat here the qualitative evidence -- see the paper for that -- but I will post a few figures that I found to be especially interesting.  

Comparative Indices
Here's the ranking and score for four prominent democracy indices used to rank overall quality of liberal democracy: 

• Freedom House: Taiwan is 94/100, tied for 19th with Chile and Germany
• Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index: 8.99/10, 8th. 
• Bertelsmann Transformation Index, 9.60/10, 3rd (of 137 non-OECD countries)
• Varieties of Democracy Liberal Democracy Index, 0.7/1, 32rd. 

All four of these score Taiwan as a full liberal democracy, and all four record improvements over the last decade. 

V-Dem is noticeably more negative than the other three on Taiwan (and much more positive on South Korea, for reasons that aren't clear to me.) So keep that in mind as we look at some of the V-Dem indicators below -- if there's systematic bias in the V-Dem estimates, they're probably too low rather than too high. 

Political Corruption and Black Gold Politics
Here's the Varieties of Democracy indicator for vote-buying, 1969-2021, which shows some real improvement after  2015. 

And here's V-Dem's political corruption score over the same time period. Almost imperceptible changes up to 2014, followed by real declines in corruption. 

Rule of Law
Here's V-Dem's Rule of Law index, 1980-2021. Roughly similar pattern, with some improvement starting 2015, although V-Dem is pretty positive on the rule of law even in 2001...

Political Polarization
Finally, here's V-Dem's political polarization measure. The trend here is counter-intuitive -- it shows the Chen Shui-bian era as not particularly polarized, and significantly less than the previous Lee Teng-hui era, followed by a further decline in polarization until 2013, then significant increases since then. 

This looks weird to me -- I've long thought the CSB era was the peak for polarization, and that it has declined since then -- but that's what the data show. 

I've put two other countries on here for reference -- compared to South Korea and the United States, Taiwan doesn't look especially polarized at any point in the last 20 years. So despite the increases on this indicator in recent years, political polarization doesn't look like the fundamental threat to democracy that Diamond worried it might be back in 2001. 

What's It All Mean?
The paper has a lot more, but summarizing: 

• Comparative indices generally show Taiwan to be a high-quality liberal democracy, and one that has registered important improvements since 2015. 
• Since 2001, Taiwan has made significant progress in Diamond's five problem areas. 
• The remaining weaknesses -- e.g. media sensationalism, distrust of judiciary, "direct democracy" agenda gone haywire -- are not especially unique to Taiwan and don't (so far) threaten the integrity of the democratic system. 
• The biggest threat to democracy in Taiwan now comes from the People's Republic of China across the Strait, including CCP-backed influence campaigns. 

Finally, this paper was inspired partly by accusations coming from some quarters in Taiwan that it is now an "illiberal democracy" or "electoral autocracy" under President Tsai Ing-wen and the ruling DPP. I wrote a blog post last December rebutting some of these accusations; this paper builds on the data and arguments there. The conclusion is the same: you really have to stretch to argue that Taiwan is in democratic decline. Most of the data point in the other direction: Taiwan's democratic system has addressed many of its most serious weaknesses since 2001, and even since 2015.