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.

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: 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. 

​In an editorial that came out on December 9 in Taiwan's United Daily News, former President Ma Ying-jeou called Taiwan an "illiberal democracy," blamed President Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP for taking actions that undermine freedom and the rule of law, and laid out a long list of complaints. ​(English version here).

Before I get into the rest of this, let me just say up front: no, Taiwan is not an illiberal democracy. It's as liberal, robust, and resilient as any of the Third Wave cases, and it's made major strides over the last 20 years in addressing some of its remaining democratic shortcomings, from strengthening the rights of criminal defendants to reducing the prevalence of vote-buying in elections. Ma has been hammering away at this theme for at least three years now (for instance, see here, here, here, and here), but his evidence of a DPP turn toward illiberalism in Taiwan has always been exceptionally weak, and until now I've considered this claim to be partisan political rhetoric intended solely for a domestic audience and not worth taking seriously.

​Taiwan at the Summit for Democracy
But this time is different. The Biden administration just hosted its Summit for Democracy, which has helped intensify an international debate about what democracy is, how it should be strengthened, and which countries are falling short of the democratic ideal. Taiwan got invited to the summit, and a Taiwan official, Audrey Tang, was given a prime speaking slot to talk about digital democracy. (Beijing of course did not get invited and is pretty salty about the whole thing.) The timing of this op-ed, and the fact that Ma's office has translated it into English, suggests he really does want to tap into this debate and attract the attention of a foreign audience.  

In that context, Ma's latest piece really sticks in my craw. He's asserting that the DPP government has "abandoned 'democracy' in favor of 'illiberal democracy'" and isn't a "worthy participant" in the Summit for Democracy. And yet, by most comparative measures, Taiwan's democracy is at or near the best shape it ever has been in. It has a freewheeling media ecosystem with many outlets that are highly critical of the government, frequent public demonstrations, broad protection for academic freedom and speech, and a judiciary that is far more independent of partisan politics than those in Korea, Malaysia, or Singapore. The Tsai Ing-wen administration's behavior in office is worlds apart from the illiberal tendencies of governments in Hungary or Turkey or the Philippines: nobody in Taiwan is shutting down universities or imprisoning journalists or murdering civil society activists, and that's something to celebrate, not pick at. 

I have a lot of respect for former president Ma, and I think a lot of what he accomplished during his presidency is undervalued or under-appreciated. He was certainly subject to a lot of accusations that he was destroying democracy in Taiwan, too--also mostly unwarranted. But I think he's pretty off base here.  And it's rather disappointing that he's chosen to stay involved in partisan politics like this after leaving office, rather than playing a post-partisan, elder statesman role. 

For those interested in a more detailed rebuttal, hit the jump. 

China's recent military bravado in the Taiwan Strait represents the end state of a failed strategy

The drums of war are growing louder in the Taiwan Strait. In the last month, at least 50 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) aircraft have entered Taiwan’s airspace. The volume of threatening language directed at Taiwan from sources in China, both official and unofficial, has reached a crescendo, and the headlines in the news grow more alarmingeach month. In the United States, mainstream foreign policy voices are now openly debating whether the U.S. should abandon strategic ambiguity and openly commit to defend Taiwan in the case of an attack — an idea advocated not so long ago by only a radical fringe.

​But these dire headlines are misleading: Beijing is not gearing up for an attack on Taiwan. It still has neither the capacity to launch a successful full-scale invasion, nor the motive to risk a conflict with the United States. In reality, the increasingly bellicose language coming from China is a sign of weakness, not strength, and a cover for the failure of its own Taiwan policy. Having thrown away most of its non-military leverage in a fruitless effort to compel Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen to endorse its one China principle, Beijing has now been reduced to counter-productive saber-rattling to express its discontent at U.S. arms sales and high-level diplomatic visits, while Taiwan races to strengthen its own defenses and reorient its economy away from overdependence on mainland China. In short, Xi Jinping’s approach to the “Taiwan issue” has turned into a strategic fiasco — one that may take years for Beijing to recover from...

It's alive! This book volume on Taiwan politics during the Ma Ying-jeou years (2008-2016), which I've edited with Chu Yun-han and Larry Diamond, just arrived in the mail from Lynne Rienner Publishers this weekend.

This is our attempt at a deep dive into various aspects of Ma-era politics, including party politics and elections, political institutions and governance challenges, trends in public opinion and democratic values, civil society and social movements, and cross-Strait and US-Taiwan-PRC relations. This look at the Ma years parallels somewhat our earlier book on the Chen Shui-bian era.

We were fortunate to be able to assemble a great group of contributors for this book--about half based in Taiwan and half abroad--who offer a variety of perspectives on the politics of the Ma years. The scholarship here draws on years of conferences, papers, and conversations that started even before President Ma left office, including with some of the key participants in and outside of the Ma administration. (Chapter 15, for instance, is by Szu-yin Ho, who served for two years as deputy Secretary-General of Ma's National Security Council.) This sort of cross-national collaboration is less common than it should be (in part because it's logistically hard to pull off!), but I am convinced the final product is much stronger for it.  

Among the many great contributions here, let me especially highlight three that provide original, provocative answers to important questions about the Ma era:

• In Chapter 3, Austin Wang explains how Tsai Ing-wen emerged from obscurity as unrivaled leader of the DPP during its years in opposition, despite having never previously held elected office;
• In Chapter 4, Nathan Batto shows how President Ma's recurrent troubles with the legislature had more to do with deep divides within the ruling KMT than they did with the obstructionist tactics of the opposition DPP and with Ma's party rival, Speaker Wang Jin-pyng;
• In Chapter 7, Isaac Shih-hao Huang and Shing-yuan Sheng demonstrate that having a majority in the Legislative Yuan does not mean a party has complete control over the Legislative Yuan, and that the legislature's decentralized law-making process makes it challenging for the executive branch to get high-priority legislation approved, whether or not the president's party holds a majority. 

For more thoughts on those issues and a broader overview of the book, check out the introductory chapter, which is available ungated from the publisher's website. 

I have a piece out in the latest issue of the Journal of Democracy on Chinese efforts to influence Taiwan politics, and why they failed in the January 2020 elections. After the DPP lost badly in the 2018 local elections, there was a lot of speculation (see, e.g. here, here, here, here, and here) that Beijing would be emboldened by these results and expand its efforts to sway the 2020 campaign and turn President Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP out of office, or failing that, would find ways to delegitimize the results and destabilize Taiwan's democracy. In the end, that didn't happen: Tsai recovered from a politically shaky first term to win an even larger share of the vote than in 2016, the DPP held onto its legislative majority, and Tsai's main opponent, Han Kuo-yu of the KMT, openly conceded defeat on election night.

In the article, I lay out several reasons why these fears did not come to pass in 2020, and why Taiwan's democracy has repeatedly proven resilient to PRC pressure campaigns. 

1. The CCP is still pretty bad at influencing public opinion: Beijing's covert influence operations have been surprisingly clumsy, badly disguised, and at odds with the long-term goals of Taiwan policy under Xi Jinping.
2. Partisanship can be a good thing: The high salience of the China factor and Taiwan's partisan divides make it hard to execute the kind of United Front-led, covert and coercive activities that the CCP favors for most of its influence operations elsewhere in the world.
3. State capacity lives: The Taiwanese state is still quite capable of responding effectively to the threat of foreign interference in elections when it takes them seriously, and the 2018 elections provided a belated wake-up call to this danger.
4. A free society helps: Taiwanese civil society, including parts of the media and NGOs, as well as private social media companies, managed to mitigate the impact of disinformation. Facebook, for instance, took down over a hundred Han Kuo-yu fan pages the month before the election for "inauthentic activity."  
5. Low-tech elections are an important backstop for democracy: Taiwan's election management system is very low-tech, but it is also transparent, accurate, efficient, fast, and fair. (For more details, see here.) Nobody disputed the election results, shocking as they were to some of Han Kuo-yu's core supporters who had believed the polls were fake and that Tsai would lose. The high trust in the voting and counting process had a lot to do with that.   

The full article is available via Project Muse, and access is free through August 15, 2020.

If Tsai Ing-wen is superstitious, she should be worried: second term presidents in Taiwan appear to be cursed. Much like President Tsai, her predecessor Ma Ying-jeou started his second term on a confident and triumphant note. But over the next four years, he faced a relentless series of political crises, including an intraparty power struggle with Legislative Yuan Speaker Wang Jin-pyng, massive protests against the death of a military conscript and construction of a nuclear power plant, and of course the Sunflower Movement occupation of the legislature, which effectively halted cross-Strait rapprochement with Beijing. President Ma’s approval ratings bottomed out at record lows, and he stepped down in 2016 on the heels of a sweeping electoral defeat of the ruling Kuomintang (KMT), ultimately having accomplished little in his last years in office.

Somehow, Chen Shui-bian’s second term was even worse. The controversy around his re-election victory in 2004 robbed him of whatever political momentum he might have enjoyed, and he spent most of his remaining tenure fending off vicious partisan attacks, anti-corruption accusations in the press, massive street rallies by his opponents, and impeachment attempts in the legislature. In his attempt to keep core pro-independence supporters on his side, President Chen pursued a brash symbolic agenda that deliberately provoked the pan-Blue opposition, infuriated Beijing, alienated even potential allies in Washington, and left him politically isolated. In the 2008 elections, his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) paid a steep electoral price, and after his term was finally over, Chen ended up in handcuffs: the corruption accusations turned out to be true, and he was sentenced to a long prison term.

The rest of this piece continues at Taiwan Insight.