To recap the argument so far: The Taiwan People's Party (TPP) controls the critical voting bloc in the Legislative Yuan, but it has not maximized the leverage that voting bloc gives it. 

1. It has not sought to obtain offices (LY speaker or deputy speaker, or cabinet positions) for its members. 
2. It has not sought concrete policy concessions from either the DPP or KMT in return for its support. 
3. It has not tried to maximize its appeal to the general electorate, and it has behaved like a pan-blue party rather than a centrist one. 

​
This behavior is puzzling! 

What Is the TPP Doing? 
I have argued that the TPP is trying to bring about a partisan realignment within the pan-blue camp, away from the KMT. This is the only goal for which the TPP’s current strategy appears rational. It's an unusual strategy, but one that makes some sense given the political constraints the party faces.

Taiwan’s electoral institutions and party system present a high barrier to third-party growth. There is high party system institutionalization and politics and voting are now quite nationalized. The electoral system is permissive enough to allow small parties to gain a foothold in city councils and in the party list vote for the legislature, but they can never expand beyond small-party status unless they replace one of the Big Two. And no small party has ever succeeded in doing so in 30+ years of democratic elections.
 
So, to try to replace the KMT, the TPP needs to do two contradictory things at the same time.

1. Convince pan-blue voters they are one of them, and in particular, to appeal to older KMT supporters while holding onto their younger base.
2. Undermine the KMT, to change beliefs about the long-term viability of that party and convince their supporters that the TPP, not the KMT, is the future.

Now, if you were leading the TPP, how might you go about this? Toward the first goal, you'd pursue a public strategy of alignment with the KMT, especially on issues that you think make the DPP look bad. And toward the second, you'd quietly block legislation that would strengthen the KMT's grassroots or increase its popularity. 

Evidence for the first part of this strategy is obvious: Huang Kuo-chang is appearing in public regularly with the KMT, the TPP is publicly opposing the recall elections against KMT legislators, and (almost) everything controversial that has made it to a final vote in the LY has passed with joint KMT-TPP support over DPP objections. 

But what about the second? Can we find evidence of divergence of interests between the two party caucuses? This is harder to spot, because the TPP doesn't want KMT supporters to notice that it is trying to undermine the party's prospects. The TPP would rather be characterized as "marching in lockstep" with the KMT in its opposition to the DPP government, and everything else that matters to the KMT. 

But I don't think this is actually true.

To begin to see why this claim might be wrong, we need to talk about survivorship bias. Survivorship bias is the logical error of focusing on outcomes that survived a selection process, while overlooking those that did not. The classic example used to illustrate this form of bias comes from the Allied bombing campaign in World War II. The U.S. military did a systematic study of planes returning from bombing missions to try to understand how to improve aircraft survival while under fire. The study noted that certain areas like the wings and fuselage had more bullet holes than the rest, and recommended reinforcing these areas since they seemed to be getting hit a lot more. But this was a fallacy: a statistician, Abraham Wald, noted that the areas with the most bullet holes were places where the plane could be hit and still survive the mission. It was the other areas -- the ones that did not show much damage in surviving planes -- that were critical to surviving a bombing mission. Planes hit in the cockpit or engine simply didn't make it back, and so were not in the "sample" of planes examined.  

Now, what does the patterns of bomber survival in WWII have to do with the Taiwanese legislature? Well, there is also a selection process that occurs before bills introduced in the legislature come up for a vote. And we haven't paid adequate attention (and I include myself in this "we") to how that process might be skewing what we actually see being debated publicly, and being passed, by the TPP-KMT coalition over DPP objections. We need to consider the possibility that stuff the two pan-blue parties don't agree on never makes it to a vote. And it's possible this is happening a lot. 

​​The inference problem here is that we don't know what bills the TPP quietly blocked, because the vast majority of bills introduced in the LY don't come up for a vote. Moreover, as I noted above, the TPP doesn't generally want people to know when they disagree with the KMT on a bill. (And an important corollary: the KMT also doesn't want people to know that it is not all-powerful in the legislature. So it, too, has an incentive to play down disagreements.) But now that we have about 18 months of legislative actions to observe, there is a growing list of oddities in legislation that has passed, and just as importantly, not passed, during this term, and I think we have enough observations to discern a pattern here: the KMT is not getting blanket support from the TPP. 

For one, here are a few changes the DPP pushed through from 2016-2023 that hit KMT interests directly, and that the KMT screamed bloody murder about at the time, that have not so far been reversed. If the TPP is doing everything the KMT wants, I would expect to see reversals on some of these issues (I'll keep updating here as I come across more): 

• ​Farmer's and Fisherman's and Irrigation Associations changed from elected to appointed leadership.
• Pension reforms, which reduced the preferential benefits enjoyed by martial-law-era civil servants (mostly KMT supporters). 
• Actions by the Ill-Gotten Party Assets Committee to freeze or confiscate KMT party assets.
• [Update 2025.8.4] The Anti-Infiltration Act. Notably, the NPP under Huang Kuo-chang and Ko Wen-je separately supported passage of this act in 2019, while the KMT has been a consistent critic of it.

And here are a few controversial bills that the KMT caucus seemed to be gung-ho about that then quietly died, or ended up looking much different when they finally passed:

• Fu Kun-chi's special infrastructure budget bill. This would have allocated at least US$60bn to build two expressways and high speed rail to Hualien -- Fu Kun-chi's constituency. (to put that in context, Taiwan's annual defense budget is less than US$20 billion.) Speaker Han Kuo-yu and Deputy Speaker Johnny Chiang co-sponsored the two most controversial bills in that package. And then...crickets. Nothing ever came of this proposal. We don't know whether this was due to internal opposition from other members of the KMT or quiet TPP opposition, but it's an interesting data point.   
• Constitutional Court reform. Lots of changes to the court were proposed after the CC ruled against the LY oversight bill, most of them designed to limit the court's authority over the LY or paralyze it completely. But the final legislation ended up at the last moment with a different threshold of nine justices required to rule legislation unconstitutional, rather than a return to the two-thirds requirement before 2022. 
• Central-local government revenue division bill. I'm less confident about this one, but there were some more extreme proposals put forward in the debate about changing the formula for allocation of government revenues between central and local governments. What ended up in the bill was a 60-40 percent allocation, not as extreme as some of what was reported at the time. Here's what the TPP had originally proposed.

Why Didn't the KMT Raise the Recall Threshold?! 
And finally, the real smoking gun -- the bill that clued me in to this whole shadow game between the TPP and KMT -- is the amendment to the Civil Servants Elections and Recall Act that passed in December 2024. Various KMT members floated proposals to raise the recall threshold as early as June 2024, to protect them from the prospect of mass recalls that they are, in fact, now facing down in less than a week. Isn't it strange that the KMT saw this threat coming a year ahead of time, and still failed to protect its own legislators? 

I had long assumed this increase in the recall threshold was inevitable and that the activists preparing to collect recall signatures were wasting their time, because it was not in the KMT's interest to leave their legislators vulnerable to a potent recall movement that was clearly a threat even last summer. They simply couldn't not change this threshold if they had the votes -- it would be political malpractice not to. And in December, when the bill amending the Elections and Recall Act looked like it was headed for passage, the reporting on the proposal implied that the threshold would be raised. I thought so too. 

Except it wasn't! 

Why not? Well, way back in July 2024 Ko Wen-je was asked about this proposal, and he said he didn't support changing the threshold. The KMT tried, probably repeatedly over many months, to get the TPP to vote for this, and...failed. They didn't have the votes. Which is why the KMT is now facing mass recalls that could strip them of their control of the LY as soon as July 28.

This seems like it should be a huge part of the recall elections story, no? The KMT's coalition partner left them exposed to a mass recall. And while the KMT now has to engage in a desperate rear-guard struggle to preserve their seats, the TPP doesn't have to do anything because their legislators are all from the party list tier. (As an aside, if I were one of the KMT legislators facing a recall vote, I'd be pissed right now. The TPP hung them out to dry on this issue.)    

And as for why the TPP might want to block raising the recall threshold, but not call attention to themselves as the reason? I will leave that question as an exercise for the reader...

I've argued that the TPP is trying a different strategy to grow their party: they are trying to become the preeminent pan-blue party and replace the KMT.

Will they succeed? I don’t think so. They're missing a couple elements to pull this strategy off. 

First is talent. Right now the TPP has three names anyone has heard of: Ko Wen-je, Huang Kuo-chang, and Huang Shan-shan. Being generous, we might say Tsai Pi-ru and Kao Hung-an also have some name recognition. Beyond that? It’s a stretch. And Huang Kuo-chang is certainly not doing anything to share the spotlight with up-and-coming younger leaders. 

Second is grassroots supporters. That means more than simply an online army of fans who turn into your livestreams and like your posts on TikTok. What the DPP and KMT still have is grassroots party activists who can be mobilized to come out to rallies, to turn out to vote, and to, yes, collect signatures for recall elections. I haven't seen a whole lot of evidence the TPP has core supporters they can rely on to turn out around the island -- in Taipei, maybe, and perhaps Hsinchu, but elsewhere they are extremely weak at local levels. 

Contrast that with the DPP and, more importantly for present purposes, the KMT. I still remember clearly watching a KMT parade and rally in Taipei in January 2016, shortly before the presidential election that year. This was one of the most difficult periods in the KMT's recent history. It was the end of the Ma Ying-jeou presidency, and President Ma was deeply unpopular. The Sunflower Movement had succeeded in blocking Ma's signature cross-Strait trade agreement, the CSSTA, and the opposition stirred up by that project contributed to the KMT's sweeping defeat in the local elections in late 2014. The party then lurched from one political crisis to another over the next year. They ended up with the deep-blue firebrand Hung Hsiu-chu as their presidential candidate when everyone else declined to run, and then had to execute a late switch of candidate from Hung to party chairman Eric Chu in fall of 2015. The party's old nemesis James Soong then declared he would run (again!) as an independent candidate to give pan-blue voters a protest vote option. And at that point, everyone knew that Eric Chu was toast.  
 
And yet, on January 8, 2016, tens of thousands of KMT supporters nevertheless showed up in Taipei from all over Taiwan for an old-fashioned political parade down Roosevelt Road to Ketagalan Boulevard, to support a hopeless campaign heading for a crushing electoral defeat. Here’s a few pictures of that.

If the TPP is going to replace the KMT, it will have to convince even these diehard loyalists that the KMT’s future is hopeless. And it will need to build chapters of activists of its own.

I have always doubted Ko Wen-je is the right person for this kind of party-building work. Ko often has analogized party-building to running a business: cold, calculating, rational, and vote (profit?)-driven. That may be true for winning over swing voters. But if the only reason voters have to support you is that you're more "rational" than the next guy, what happens when they no longer believe that? What if there's another guy who comes along who offers better answers to their problems? The fans you've acquired, if they like you only because you "do the right thing," are going to abandon you when they no longer believe you have their best interests at heart. Success is easy come, easy go in this model.

There is, however, a different model of party-building in Taiwan, one that the DPP followed in its early days, which is based on identity appeals. "Our party stands for you. Our people are like you. We have suffered the same things you have. We speak the same language you have. You can trust us." Those appeals may turn some voters off...But for the DPP they also built a loyal following that has stuck with them through bad times as well as good. I just don't see the TPP doing the hard work of building those grassroots connections that can outlast any particular leader, either under Ko Wen-je or now, under Huang Kuo-chang.

Does the TPP Have a Future?: What To Look For
Putting this series of posts together has also clarified for me that the 2026 local elections are really critical for the TPP's future. Given Ko’s detention, Kao Hung-an’s suspension, and the party’s slump in the polls over the last year, they desperately need to demonstrate that they still have room to grow their electoral support. They need to develop a deeper bench of local talent – candidates who can win votes independently of the TPP’s brand and have crossover appeal. They need to run their own candidates – and win! – in some of the local mayor’s races. And they need to expand the number of seats they hold in the local councils (they won 14 last time – significant for a third party in Taiwan, but also only 1.5% of all seats.)

But the most fundamental question for the TPP in 2026 is whether to coordinate future nominations with the KMT. In 2023, Ko Wen-je rather naively assumed he could come to some kind of agreement with Eric Chu and Hou You-yi that would give him a clear path to the top of a joint presidential ticket. The spectacular way in which that agreement fell apart is a cautionary tale for the TPP. But for the party to have a chance of winning any of these offices in 2026, they still need to get the KMT to yield some nominations to TPP candidates. So the party is caught on the horns of a dilemma: cooperate and get absorbed, or don’t cooperate and throw elections to the DPP, or worse -- watch the KMT win these elections anyway and demonstrate the TPP is irrelevant. I’m not sure how they will resolve this dilemma. I’m more confident in predicting that the KMT will drive a hard bargain in any nomination negotiations, despite the TPP-KMT track record of cooperation in the LY right now, than I am in predicting the TPP's strategy in 2026.

So to wrap up, I’ll stick my neck out here and say flat out that I don’t think the TPP is going to succeed in initiating a partisan realignment away from the KMT, however they choose to approach 2026 (and 2028, for that matter). The party is much more likely to decline or collapse after the next election than to surge into second place and usher in a lasting change to Taiwan’s party system.

​But it is going to be fascinating to watch them try.

​In the previous post, I described what I think is the biggest mystery in Taiwan politics right now: the behavior of the Taiwan People's Party. The party is the kingmaker in the legislature but doesn't appear to have maximized its leverage over the last 18 months, and I have had trouble understanding what its strategy is.

I think I understand now. The TPP is all-in on votes, not offices or policy, but they are pursuing votes in an unusual way: rather than try to pull equally from both blue and green camps, which is what most observers thought they were doing in the run-up to 2024, they are now prioritizing pan-blue votes. The reason is that they are trying to take over the KMT's space in the political spectrum through a fundamental realignment of the pan-blue camp. 

So, rather than be a swing bloc in the legislature jumping between the camps issue by issue, they have instead decided for the moment to mimic the KMT. Even though most of their members are not ideologically aligned with the KMT--especially on the China issue--they nevertheless need to sound and act like a pan-blue party because they want deep blue voters to consider voting for their candidates in the future. 

To see both the rationale for this kind of strategy in Taiwan, and why the party's recent behavior and rhetoric makes sense if replacing the KMT is their ultimate goal, we first need to understand the political context in which they are operating.

There are three things about Taiwan's party system that make it rather distinct among young democracies, and hard for third parties to survive for long:

1. It has high party system institutionalization. Taiwan is unusual among young democracies in having a well-institutionalized party system. Party system institutionalization, or PSI, is the extent to which a party system is stable, predictable, and characterized by established patterns of interaction between political parties. We can measure PSI by looking at electoral volatility across elections, at the level of partisanship in the electorate, and the degree of coherence and organization of the individual political parties. On all these measures, Taiwan looks more like a mature democracy than a young Third Wave one -- it has relatively low electoral volatility, high partisanship, and well-organized and hierarchical political parties that compete with one another almost everywhere. 

2. It tends toward two-partism. Taiwan's effective number of parties (ENPs) in the legislature this term is 2.38. Since the new electoral system was used for the first time in 2008, this number has never exceeded 2.5: it was 2.44 in 2020; 2.17 in 2016, 2.23 in 2012, and 1.75 in 2008. The same two parties that finished 1-2 in 1992, the KMT and DPP, finished 2-1 in 2024, and they have been the top two vote and seat-winners in every legislative election in between. They also are almost always the top two finishers in mayoral races around the island. There are not many other Third Wave democracies that have had such a consistent pattern of two-party competition, and even among older democracies, the persistence of the same two parties winning in every election for 30 years is quite unusual.  

3. Voting patterns are highly nationalized. Party system nationalization refers to how consistent voting patterns are across a country. It has two components: static nationalization, or how much party vote shares vary across different localities or regions, and dynamic nationalization, or how much vote swings between the parties vary across these same jurisdictions. On the first, static, nationalization measure, although the two major parties have regional strongholds -- the DPP in the south, the KMT in the rural north, east coast, and offshore islands -- they both compete everywhere. There is no regionally-based party akin to the Parti Quebecois in Canada, or the Scottish National Party in the UK, or DMK, Shiv Sena, or Trinamool Congress Party (among many) in India. Nor do Taiwan's regional party strongholds look anywhere near as extreme as South Korea's, where the liberal camp routinely wins 80+% of the vote in the southwest (Jeolla), and the conservative camp wins 80+% in the southeast (Gyeongsang). And on the second, dynamic, nationalization measure, the swing between the DPP and KMT in each election has been remarkably consistent across the island. For instance, in the 2016 election, Tsai Ing-wen improved her vote share over her 2012 campaign in every single jurisdiction in Taiwan, and that increase varied only from about 5% in Penghu to about 12% in Taipei. 

Why does Taiwan's party system look this way? Three reasons. First, Taiwan's unusual pattern of bottom up democratization, starting with electoral competition at the local level and gradually culminating in direct election of the LY and the president, plus the survival of the formerly authoritarian KMT into the democratic era, led to the emergence of two big parties with strong grassroots chapters, a hierarchical structure, and similar party organizations. For the last 30 years, KMT and DPP candidates have run against each other almost everywhere in Taiwan, and they also dominate the majoritarian elections for the president, legislature, and city and county executives.

Second, the China question is by far the most salient issue in Taiwan politics and the only one on which all major political parties take distinct positions. The DPP and KMT are distinguished mostly by their different approaches to managing relations with the PRC; on most other policy issues, the Big Two are as divided internally as they are with each other. 

Third, and most important for present purposes, are Taiwan's electoral institutions. The LY is about 65% elected from single-member districts (SMDs) under plurality rule; about 30% from a proportional representation closed-list tier elected via a second party list ballot with a 5% threshold; and about 5% from two reserved indigenous multi-member districts (MMDs) using single-non-transferable vote (SNTV), each with three seats (M=3). The president is directly elected under plurality rule with no runoff, as are all local chief executives. And local councils are still elected using SNTV in relatively high-magnitude MMDs (typically M≥5). 

​​The consequences of this institutional setup are twofold. First, it is relatively easy for small parties to win a few seats in the legislature through the PR tier, and in local councils because of the high district magnitudes (meaning a lower share of the vote is needed to win a seat). The electoral systems for assemblies at both levels are permissive enough to allow the most successful third parties to survive for a while, and they can even occasionally end up in a kingmaker role controlling the balance of power, as the TPP has managed to do in the current legislature. But third parties face a much more daunting challenge if they want to become more than just small niche parties: they also have to win some of the SMD plurality races outright and not simply play a spoiler role in these elections. And to date, no third party in Taiwan has managed to succeed at this challenge. ​

Run on a Second Dimension Issue, or Be More Extreme
Most new parties in Taiwan have responded to this electoral context by adopting one of two strategies. Some of them have chosen to play down or ignore the China question altogether and campaign solely on a second-dimension issue: labor rights, environmental protection, religion, LGBTQ issues, indigenous rights, health care and social welfare, and so on.

A good example of this type of party is the Green Party Taiwan, whose history is detailed in Dafydd Fell's new book. The GPT was founded in the 1990s, and although it has stuck around much longer than most other third parties from that era, it has never succeeded in winning more than a single LY seat over that time period. And yet the Green Party Taiwan is actually one of the most successful examples of parties choosing this path, which is littered with electoral failures. There are hundreds of second-dimension parties that ran on an issue orthogonal to the China question and did not attract sufficient attention or votes to break through in races for the legislature or for local councils. Today, most of them are long gone and forgotten. 

The other strategy has been to take a more extreme position than the Big Two on the China question. This path has been more successful, and it is the one that the small parties people have actually heard of have used. For instance, to the pro-independence side of the DPP are the Taiwan Independence Party 建國黨, the Taiwan Solidarity Union 台聯, the New Power Party 時代力量, and the Taiwan State-Building Party 台灣基進黨; to the more pro-unification side of the KMT are the New Party 新黨, the People First Party 親民黨, and the China Unification Promotion Party 中國統一促進黨. (These are what Dafydd Fell, following Paul Lucardie, calls "purifier" parties).

Some of these parties have also leaned into a second-dimension issue on which one of the big parties is divided; for instance, the TSU was more protectionist and socially conservative than the DPP, and as Lev Nachman's new book details, the NPP was more socially liberal and pro-environment. Going further back in Taiwan, in the 1990s the New Party was pro-democratic reform and anti-corruption and sometimes teamed up with the DPP against the KMT on these issues, even though the two held polar opposite positions on the China question.  

The Small Party "Valley of Death" in Taiwan Politics
The problem for parties following the second path has been how to grow beyond the extremist fringe. When small parties have attempted to expand beyond the relative safety of MMDs to compete in SMDs, time and time again they have fallen into the "valley of death" (to borrow a term from the venture capital world): they cannot ever break through in enough single member district races to convince voters they are on track to replacing one of the Big Two, and they instead lose support and fade away. 

This pattern of failure occurs for two reasons. First, the Big Two don't just stand idly by. When third parties that are more extreme on the China issue run candidates in SMDs, they pose a more serious threat to the big party in their camp than simply competing in the PR list or local council races. Sometimes this party responds by offering a pre-electoral coalition, as the DPP did with the NPP in 2016, and the KMT did with the PFP in 2008; in both of these cases, the small party later got mostly absorbed into the larger party. Other times the big party goes on the offensive and attempts to knock out the smaller challenger, rallying its voters against the small party by portraying it as a traitor to the cause, as the DPP did with the Taiwan Independence Party in the late 1990s. But either way, the small party runs up against an insurmountable wall: they cannot win in the single member districts without attracting votes from some of the big party's supporters, and the big party has both the incentives and the means to prevent defections like this in most cases. 

Second, small parties are consistently disadvantaged by strategic voting. In Taiwan, the China factor is so important to so many voters that the incentives for strategic voting are quite strong in the SMD races: for the president and legislature for sure, and even occasionally in the local city and county executives. Voters don't want to waste their votes on a third-party candidate if it will throw the election to the big party they hate, so third party candidates have to convince people they are running not just to play spoiler but to actually win a three-way race against both of the Big Two. And breaking through in these single-member district elections is hard: there's a discontinuity between being perceived as the likely 2nd-place party and being in 3rd or lower. (The jargon-y political science term for this pattern is the M+1 rule: in any district of magnitude M, there will be at most M+1 viable candidates because most voters will ignore or abandon the rest). 

Put differently, although Taiwan's electoral institutions consistently provide some space for small parties to compete and win a few seats here and there, they do not provide room for more than two big parties -- at least as long as the party system remains highly institutionalized and voting patterns are nationalized. That means that if you lead a small party and hope to stick around in politics for the long term, you have only two choices: (1) join one of the big parties, or (2) replace one with your own. 

Now, with this context in mind, consider again the position of the Taiwan People's Party. The TPP is yet another third party trying to grow into a serious challenger to the Big Two. But since Ko Wen-je founded it in 2019, it has pursued a different strategy from other third parties: it positioned itself as centrist on the China issue, to the point where it adopted aquamarine (neither blue nor green) as its party color. And in addition to playing to the middle on China, it also leaned heavily on Ko's personal appeal to attract votes. 

By historical standards, this strategy worked. In the 2024 elections the party garnered over 20% of the party list vote, eight seats in the LY, and a kingmaker position in the LY for four years. No other party since 2008 has pulled that off. It's an impressive achievement!

And yet, it's not enough. All of the LY seats the TPP holds are via the party list; it didn't win a single district race. For a third-party candidate, Ko Wen-je did remarkably well in the presidential election -- but he still came in third. And now that he is detained indefinitely while he faces corruption charges, the TPP cannot count on Ko to win votes for them in the future and has to find some other way to appeal to the electorate. The party also no longer holds any local executive offices -- in 2022, Ko's preferred successor in Taipei, Huang Shan-shan, came in third behind the KMT's Chiang Wan-an and the DPP's Chen Shih-chung, and the party's one success story that year, Kao Hung-an's upset victory in the mayor's race in Hsinchu City, has effectively been reversed by Kao's subsequent suspension for padding her salary through reimbursements to non-existent staff while she was a legislator; she is likely to be recalled as mayor later this month.

So, despite holding a prime position in the LY right now, the TPP is also facing existential challenges. Can it reinvent itself as something more than the Ko-P party, now that Ko Wen-je is indefinitely sidelined? And if it wants not only to survive but also to thrive, it needs to find a way to displace one of the Big Two in some of the SMD seats. And what's the best strategy for that? Does it remain a free agent, swinging between green and blue depending on the issue, and get squeezed out in the next election (a la James Soong and the PFP)? Does it enter a pre-electoral coalition with one or the other, at the risk of absorption (like the NPP in 2016)? Or is there a third option? 

​I think they've decided on a more ambitious strategy: replacing the KMT. 

​For more on that strategy, see Part 3. 

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. 

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)_/¯.

Result: KMT gain. Chiang Wan-an wins, 42.3-32.0-25.1%. CEC official results are here. 

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. 

​Result: KMT hold. Hou You-yi wins 62.4-37.6%. 

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.   

Result: KMT gain. Simon Chang wins 52.0-40.0%. 

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. 

Result: KMT hold. Lu Shiow-yen wins 59.3-38.9%. 

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. 

​Result: DPP hold. Huang wins 48.8-43.6%. 

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. 

​Result: DPP hold. Chen Chi-mai wins 58.1-40.2% 

​One of the more interesting developments in Taiwan's 2016 general election was the rise of so-called  "Third Force" parties--completely new entrants into the political system, rather than break-aways from the KMT or the DPP.  While some of the media commentary got a bit carried away about the significance of these new parties, the founding of one, the New Power Party (NPP), did pose a serious threat to the DPP's chances of winning a majority in the legislature. As an offshoot of the Sunflower Movement, the NPP positioned its message in a way calculated to appeal to pan-green voters, and it recruited high-profile candidates to run in district races, not just the party list. These district candidates had the potential to split the pan-green vote in what everyone expected would be a very anti-KMT year, and in a worst-case scenario for their side, help the KMT hold on to their legislative majority. 

In the end, a pan-green split didn't happen. A key reason is that the DPP headed off the threat early: the party formed a kind of pre-electoral coalition by yielding 11 districts to the NPP and other non-DPP candidates in exchange for their support not to run against DPP candidates elsewhere. And the districts that the DPP yielded were, with one exception, far past the critical 57th seat needed to deliver a legislative majority. It turned out to be a good deal for the DPP, which won 68 seats overall. It also, more surprisingly, turned out well for the NPP, which won all three district seats and five overall and became the third largest party in the LY. 

The NPP Surprise
My own expectation going into the election was that the NPP candidates would perform worse, on average, than a generic DPP challenger. (In fact, if you read that linked post closely, I was even more specific: 2-4 points worse, on average.) The rationale was pretty simple: Freddy Lim, Hung Tzu-yung, and Huang Kuo-chang were already household names, but their close association with the Sunflower Movement, and the acerbic rhetoric of Huang, especially, suggested they would be fairly polarizing as candidates. And in the traditionally blue-leaning districts of Taipei 5 (Lim) and New Taipei 12 (Huang), I thought they would turn off more voters than they attracted with that approach. 

So what actually happened? In the graph above, I've plotted the vote share of each DPP and DPP-endorsed district candidate against Tsai Ing-wen's share of the presidential vote in the same district. DPP incumbents are represented by solid dots; challengers (i.e. non-incumbents) by hollow ones; NPP candidates by hollow squares, and other non-DPP candidates by hollow triangles. (A hearty thank you to Frozen Garlic for doing the yeoman's work of sorting the presidential race vote totals by LY district and making these data publicly available.)

Thoughts on this below the break. 

​I've been going through some of the 2016 Taiwan elections data for another project, and I came across something that I haven't seen noted elsewhere. In the presidential vote, Tsai Ing-wen actually improved her vote shares more in the north than elsewhere in Taiwan.

Nationally, she won 45.63% of the total vote in 2012, and 56.12% in 2016, for a net aggregate swing of 10.49%. But this increase wasn't uniform across Taiwan. Her worst performance relative to 2012 was in Penghu, where her vote share increased from 45.65% to 50.81%, for a net swing of only 5.16%. Her best was in Taipei, where she increased her vote share from 39.54% to 51.96%, for a net swing of 12.41%, which gave her an absolute majority of the vote. Again, that was in Taipei, which was supposed to be the bluest stronghold of them all, and the most resistant to the appeal of the DPP ticket! (Or at least that's what this idiot thought.) 

Moreover, Taipei wasn't an outlier. From Keelung all the way through Miaoli, Tsai's vote share increased more in every single northern jurisdiction than it did nationally, as the table below shows. By contrast, the swing toward Tsai was lowest in the south and east/island jurisdictions. And central Taiwan, where I thought the swing would be largest, was actually slightly behind the national average. (Perhaps that's one of the reasons several endangered KMT incumbent legislators in Taichung and Nantou held on to win re-election. More on that in another post.)

This result is surprising in part because it's the opposite of what happened in 2012, when the national swing toward Tsai was 4.24%. In that election, Tsai's gain was lowest in Taipei at 2.58%, and highest in Pingtung at 4.88%. In other words, in 2016 Tsai improved the most in precisely the places where she improved the least in 2012. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Taipei itself: a DPP majority there was hard to imagine as recently as two years ago.

​The North Is No Longer Blue
​Tsai's wins in the north are also surprising because the conventional wisdom has long held that Taiwan has a strong regional divide, with a deep blue north, deep green south, and swing districts in the middle. This is obviously a simplification, but it's so widely accepted among the political commentariat in Taiwan that there's even a wikipedia entry in Chinese for the phrase, "blue north, green south" (beilan, nanlü 北藍南綠).

The accepted explanation for these regional political differences is that they reflect socioeconomic and sub-ethnic ones: there are more waishengren in the north and east, aborigines in the east and central highlands, and a concentration of Hakka voters in Miaoli and Hsinchu Counties who have tended to support pan-blue candidates, while the Hoklo benshengren heartland of Tainan has been the DPP's strongest area.

​But some research has found region to be a significant independent predictor of vote choice even accounting for partisanship, national identity, age, occupation, attitudes toward cross-Strait relations, and so forth. Why would this be? Part is probably a "local hero" effect--national candidates do better than average in their hometowns because of their long-standing personal connections there that trump partisan affinities. Part is certainly a factional story: when local factions switch sides they can bring a big chunk of votes with them all the way up to the presidential level. But while these effects certainly have existed in local and legislative elections for a long time, it's not obvious that they consistently matter in presidential ones.
​ 
Does Political Geography Still Matter in Taiwan?
The way that Tsai won in 2016 leads me to think we should reconsider how, or even whether, geography has an independent effect in presidential elections. It's not self-evident that presidential vote choice in 2016 had anything to do with where voters lived, once we take into account all the usual demographic variables. There was no pan-blue firewall north of the Choshui River, and the DPP's win was clearly not built on turning out more core supporters in pan-green strongholds in the south. Instead, the swing data suggest a shift in the same groups of voters toward Tsai and away from the KMT all over the island. (Voting for the legislature is a different matter--I'll tackle that in a separate post.)

Granted, the swing toward Tsai was not as uniform as in 2012, when it ranged between only 2.58 and 4.88%. But still, in every single locality Tsai won at least 5% more in 2016 than she did four years ago. That suggests, for at least the last two elections, voters who switched their votes to Tsai did so because of factors not correlated with where they lived.

The best illustration of the irrelevance of geography to vote choice is what happened in New Taipei, where Eric Chu was, and still is, the mayor. He was re-elected there in 2014, holding on during a green wave that flipped most of the other local executives to the DPP. If a candidate's local connections matter at all, then Chu probably should have been able to deliver a hometown bump. Yet a little over a year later he won only 1/3 of the vote in New Taipei, winning 250,000 votes less than he did in the mayor's race, a lower share than the 37.5% he got in Taipei City proper and only 2 points above his island-wide total. And as the figures above show, Tsai Ing-wen improved more in New Taipei than she did nationally--not the result we'd expect if Chu was enjoying some kind of home-court advantage.     

​Now THIS is What a Party Stronghold Looks Like
Finally, consider the comparative angle. There's a country not far away that demonstrates exceptionally strong regional effects on voting behavior: South Korea. In the last presidential election there (in 2012), the opposition candidate Moon Jae-in won at least 85% of the vote in the three provinces that make up the southwest region of Jeolla, while the incumbent party candidate Park Geun-hye won over 80% in two provinces in the southeast region of Gyeongsang. That is a stark regional divide that has been present since the beginning of the democratic era in Korea. By this standard, Taiwan doesn't look very divided by geography at all. 

Does Where You Live Affect Who You Support for President?
In fact, it's worth considering whether the "blue north, green south" trope has outlived its usefulness as a guide to voting behavior in Taiwan. The Taiwanese media often writes election narratives that emphasize geography as the key to understanding voting patterns in presidential elections, with frequent discussion of "battleground regions" and "swing districts." And political scientists, too, routinely use the language of electoral geography to talk about presidential campaigns. (I'm guilty of this too. For other instances, see here, here, and for a kick, this wikileaks cable from AIT.)

But if you think about this a bit, it's an odd way to characterize voting for a single national office. Taiwan doesn't have an electoral college, so an extra vote for Tsai in Penghu is worth the same as one in Taipei, or Taichung, or Hualien, or anywhere else in Taiwan. When we talk about "swing regions" we are implicitly underemphasizing factors that don't vary much by location and playing up ones that do, like factional ties. And I'm starting to think those other, non-geographic factors are where the real story is at, particularly differences between age cohorts. Something to keep in mind as we pour over the post-election survey data. 

​Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP are headed for a historic victory in Saturday’s elections, and the battle has already begun to define the narrative about what that means. One fairly common refrain is that this likely outcome will presage a fundamental realignment of the party system around issues beyond the blue-green divide over cross-Strait relations.
 
I’m skeptical that we are about to see this kind of realigning election, despite the attention given to the campaigns of the so-called “Third Force” parties. I’m also skeptical that this result will be the death knell for the KMT as a political party capable of winning elections. The KMT's coming defeat clearly reflects deep unhappiness with Ma Ying-jeou and the KMT’s rule over the last eight years, intensified by a spectacularly ill-timed economic downturn over the last few months (at least if you are a KMT member!) But an unpopular leader, toxic party brand, and disillusioned supporters are not fatal to major party survival, as the DPP showed after its 2008 electoral thrashing. So while a KMT recovery is not assured, and will at a minimum require some major leadership shakeups, we shouldn't expect the party simply to fade away, and for all those pan-blue supporters (still at least 30 percent of the electorate) to suddenly become fans of the DPP or one of the new parties.

Of course, I could be totally wrong--I'm just some guy on the internet, after all. But either way, we'll know a lot more soon: elections have a nice way of splashing everybody with a cold dose of reality. The results of the election this Saturday will give us the most concrete evidence we'll have to evaluate these competing narratives. So, in the interest of intellectual honesty, let me lay out my own expectations about what will happen, and what it means. Beyond who wins and loses, here's what I'll be watching most closely to see where Taiwanese politics is headed.

Some of the sharper commentary on the upcoming election has noted how livelihood issues, such as a growing wealth gap, soaring housing prices, and stubbornly high youth unemployment rate, are a big part of the reason public opinion has swung so dramatically against the KMT over the last two years, rather than cross-Strait relations. If I can hammer one thing home to outside observers about this election, it's that domestic issues, rather than cross-Strait relations, are what will decide this coming election. The outcome is not really a referendum on Taiwan's relationship with China, or an indication of a sudden surge in Taiwanese nationalism, but instead reflects deep concerns with "bread and butter" issues.  

So what do I mean by bread and butter issues? Well, the commentary linked above is focused mostly on the concerns about income and wealth distribution that have been salient for a while and have gotten a lot of press in recent years. But in addition, there's something much more recent and fundamental working against the KMT right now: the economy is just not doing very well. Here's a sample of the (English-language) economic news reports coming out of Taiwan over the last few months: 

Taiwan is in a recession, and it's China's fault -- Forbes (December 1)
Weaker growth exposes downsides of China ties -- The Economist (November 14)
Industrial production falls 15% -- Taipei Times (November 20)
Unpaid leave hits 3-year high -- Taipei Times (November 17)
Taiwan nears recession, exports to China slump -- (October 31)
Taiwan exports in decline -- Voice of America (October 16)
GDP growth forecast cut to below 1% -- FocusTaiwan (October 15)
Tax revenue falls by 14.3% over previous year -- Taipei Times (October 13)
Rising pessimism about economy  -- China Post (October 12)
TISR poll: 81% believe economy in bad shape -- via Solidarity.tw (September 14)
TAIEX suffers worst-ever one-day drop -- Taipei Times (August 25)

What all that reporting is trying to say can be summed up succinctly by the chart at the top of this page: Taiwan's economy is now rather suddenly headed into a recession, if it's not already in one. And that makes this a terrible moment to be running as an incumbent party. 

Economic Voting in Democracies. The theory of economic voting behind this claim is that economic conditions powerfully shape electoral outcomes in democracies everywhere. As Michael Lewis-Beck puts it in a great review article, "good times keep parties in office, bad times cast them out."

I should note that the evidence for this effect and its size varies a lot across countries, and the sometimes puzzling variation in the size of economic effects remains an open area of inquiry in political science. 

For instance, when the government is supported by a coalition of several parties, it's harder for voters to figure out which members deserve the blame for bad performance. The lack of a credible alternative to the incumbent--an opposition party or candidate who appears likely to do better--also leads to a weaker effect. (The opposition to the LDP in Japan has long struggled with a credibility problem, for instance.) And sometimes it's clear to voters that governments don't have much influence at all over bad economic outcomes because of global factors beyond their control, so they are less likely to punish incumbents at the ballot box.

In addition, voters turn out to have really short memories (i.e. they're "myopic," in the jargon of the discipline): the performance of the economy over the last six months matters a great deal more than the performance over a government's whole term in office. This is probably why the Conservatives in Britain, for instance, recently won re-election after presiding over an austerity-induced downturn during much of their first term.

Nevertheless, the basic claim, that economic downturns motivate voters to vote out incumbent governments when they can, is quite robust. In the United States, in fact, the state of the economy in the few months before a presidential election appears to be the single most important factor in who wins, more than the candidates themselves, their parties' policy platforms, or their campaigns.  

Bad Economy = Bad Polls. At about the same point that the economy started to sour over the last six months, Taiwan's presidential election turned from a competitive race into a rout. As the Taiwan Indicators Survey Research survey reproduced above shows, at the beginning of June, one could at least imagine a combined pan-blue effort that would give Tsai Ing-wen a real race: support for Hung Hsiu-chu and James Soong together was at 44.8%, above Tsai's 37.1%. But then what happened? Support for both cratered.

Part of that was Hung's own shortcomings as a candidate, but once she was replaced by Eric Chu, the KMT should have seen a real bounce. It hasn't. Chu is now down around 20% in the polls. That's likely to go up somewhat as pan-blue voters come back to the fold, and there are other polls showing him getting up to 30%. But even if pan-blue voters coordinated on a single candidate, the combined Chu-Soong support is nowhere near enough to make this a race anymore. It's all but over now. 

Some of this decline in the polls is undoubtedly self-inflicted--the fiasco with Hung and the presence of James Soong in a spoiler's role yet again could probably have been avoided. But even if Eric Chu had accepted the nomination back in March, and Soong hadn't joined the race, I still don't think this would be much of a contest right now. The reason is those economic figures: Chu is the standard-bearer for a party that in voters' eyes is squarely to blame for this economic downturn, and they're going to have a chance in less than three weeks to weigh in.

​Tsai Ing-wen is not Ma Ying-jeou or the KMT, and in these circumstances that looks like all she needs to win a comfortable victory. Cross-Strait policy, debate performances, campaign promises, VP selections--none of it is going to matter. In this election, it really is about the economy.

This is fun: we have an argument! I made some assertions and predictions in a post on the upcoming LY election, and Nathan Batto of the Frozen Garlic blog has taken me to task a bit.
 
So what's my response? Well, let me begin by agreeing with Nathan: I AM completely wrong about one big thing. I made an elementary error when I calculated the effects of a swing toward Tsai and away from the pan-blue camp: I forgot to divide by two. As a consequence, my forecast violated what I will now forever remember as the First Law of Swing: if one party goes up, some other party must come down (click that link, BTW, it's good stuff.) In hindsight, a really silly mistake. This pretty much sums up my position: ​

Nevertheless, simple mistake, simple fix. Divide by two, dummy. Below is the same ranking of LY seats, with an extra column added that gives the size of the swing needed to flip the district to the other camp (swing toward Tsai from 2012 is positive, swing away is negative).

(Updated data file is below. I've corrected a few errors in the previous file; they're listed in the documentation sheet. Most changes were small enough to be inconsequential, but Nathan pointed out a significant one: Tsai's Hualien vote in 2012 was 25.9, not 29.9. Thanks for catching that.)

Forecast, Take Two
With that mea culpa out of the way, I still think the basic approach here is sound, assuming one does the math right: go down the swing column, take a guess what you think Tsai will get above her 2012 vote share, and that’ll tell you roughly which districts she’ll carry. (Note that by "carry," I mean she'll win a majority over the combined Chu-Soong vote, not just a plurality over Chu.) And if Tsai carries a district, it’s going to be tough for the KMT candidate to hold it.

So, again assuming Taitung reverts to its natural blueness:

• the magic seat number for a DPP is still #41,
• that's still New Taipei 10.

For Tsai to carry that district, she'd need an increase in her vote share of 5.23% above 2012, or 45.63+5.23 = 50.86% of the total presidential vote.
 
Nathan argues that we should give KMT incumbents at least an extra two points cushion on average (see discussion below). So let's be conservative, do that for all KMT candidates (most of the seats the DPP would have to win are being defended by incumbents anyway), and round up. That means if Tsai wins at least 53% of the presidential vote, then the DPP is likely to have a majority in the LY. She’s currently polling well above 53%, so the DPP is a strong favorite to win a single-party majority. 

Thus, I'm actually coming down very close to Nathan's forecast that a Tsai share of the vote somewhere between 53-54% is sufficient to get the DPP to a majority.

I also agree that once Tsai gets much higher than that, the legislative election has the potential to turn into a slaughter. A uniform (big assumption!) 12 point swing toward Tsai (45.63-->57.63%) means she would carry every district all the way down to Hsinchu City, ranked #56 on the list. That would leave the KMT with at most about 17 district seats, which starts to look like the DPP's situation after 2008. (Unlike the DPP, the KMT is cushioned a bit by an advantage in the aborigine seats. But only a bit.)

So, basically, we're in agreement. But that's boring, so let's see if I can find something else to argue with Nathan about.

 Assumptions about 2016: Room for an Argument?
​As Nathan noted, debates are good because they force us to clarify our assumptions and claims and double-check our data. So in that spirit, let me list the key assumptions this forecast rests on (later I'll explore what happens when we relax a couple of these, so don't bug out yet!). They are:

• A1. DPP LY candidates will run close to Tsai in 2016; that is, every DPP candidate's vote share will be approximately the same as Tsai's LY district vote share.
• A2. The percent change in Tsai's vote from 2012 will be uniform across all LY districts.
• A3. The electorate in the presidential election in each district is the same as in the legislative election.* 
• A4. The DPP will win 16 non-SMD seats: 16 PR seats and no aborigine seats.

I'll tackle A1 now, and address the rest in separate posts. (Otherwise this post will be book-length by the time I'm done. And the election might already be over!)

A1: Will DPP LY candidates run close to Tsai in 2016?
This assumption can be challenged on at least two fronts: (1) incumbency advantage, and (2) the behavior of disaffected pan-blue voters. Nathan devoted a lot of space to (1), so I'll start with a consideration of that. Here's what I find when I run the numbers again: 

• "Incumbency advantage" in Taiwan does exist. Incumbents do better all else equal. Whether that's because they have the resources of office to draw on in elections, or they're better types, we can't say from just these data. It's probably a bit of both. But if you're trying to hold on to a seat, it's better to have the incumbent in the race than the challenger. So I agree with Nathan here.
• Once we look only at DPP-KMT head-to-head races: KMT incumbents ran ahead of Ma Ying-jeou on average in 2012 by about 1.4 points. And DPP incumbents actually ran further ahead of Tsai (+3.5 vs +1.4; Nathan's numbers are +4.5 to +2.2). So incumbents in both parties did systematically better than non-incumbents. I agree with Nathan here, too.
• But the big picture remains the same: relative to the potential swing we're talking about, any advantage the KMT will get from having incumbents running will be small. If Tsai is winning even 55% of the vote, a lot of KMT incumbents are toast even if their DPP opponents are running a couple points behind her. (I think Nathan agrees with this too.)

Now, the data. I initially claimed based on the full set of 73 districts that there wasn't evidence of a KMT "incumbent advantage" in 2012. That is, that KMT LY candidates didn't run significantly ahead of Ma Ying-jeou. Nathan argued quite sensibly that we should look only at those races where the KMT and DPP candidates together got almost all the vote. The question then is, what is "almost all"? Nathan went with 95% of the total vote. I initially went with no single 3rd party candidate winning >5% of the vote, which accounts for some of the discrepancy between us.

I've replicated his analysis with my data, and come up with similar numbers to his, although I find a weaker KMT incumbency advantage than he does (1.4 vs. 2.2 points ahead). The remaining discrepancy appears to be in our coding of incumbents in the head-to-head cases: I have 32 in the KMT, and 12 in the DPP, to 30 and 10 for Nathan. (I pulled my coding from the CEC website, which records party list legislators running in districts as incumbents, and I may have missed a couple of these. So I'd trust Nathan's incumbency coding over mine.) The signs remain the same, though, and so does the conclusion: incumbency provides an electoral benefit​, albeit a small one.

Instead of a crappy image of a simple table (dammit, Weebly), I find it more helpful to see a visual representation of what we're talking about. Below I've plotted the 2012 LY vote data against the presidential vote, distinguishing between incumbents (solid) and non-incumbents (hollow). The red line is just the function y=x; that is, dots above this line represent candidates who ran ahead of the presidential ticket, and dots below represent those who ran behind.

Here's the DPP:

This is a really good fit. The correlation between Tsai and the LY candidates vote share is about 0.826, and there's only one obvious outlier. (That's Kaohsiung 9, where Chen Chih-chung split the DPP vote.) Note also that even just at a glance, DPP incumbents appear to be doing significantly better than challengers: if we ignore Kaohsiung 9, all but about three are at or above the line, which means they got as many votes as Tsai did.*

Now let's look at the KMT:

The fit is...less good. (r=.377). There are a lot more outliers, especially in deep blue areas where Ma got a lot of the vote. If we want to evaluate whether there's an incumbent advantage on the KMT side as well, we need to account for this. Hence the decision to drop the 25 cases where there was a significant 3rd-party vote. 

Here's what the picture looks like with just the 48 districts where KMT+DPP LY vote > 95%: 

Ah, much better. Now the KMT looks a lot more like the DPP picture, and the correlation is about the same (r=.835 vs 0.860 for the DPP). I count 9 incumbents who clearly ran behind Ma, but at least 21 who ran ahead. Three of those even ran way ahead in tough districts where Ma got less than 42% of the vote. This is a demonstration that there's a KMT incumbency advantage, right? And isn't it therefore at least plausible that some KMT incumbents could survive a Tsai wave because of this, even if their districts turn green?

Well, yes, if you define this advantage as running significantly ahead of the KMT presidential standard-bearer, Ma. But this is not actually what matters for winning reelection. What the forecast above relies on is the Tsai vote in each district, which is the complement of not just the Ma vote but of Ma+Soong. In other words, I assumed that everyone voting for Soong would also vote for the KMT LY candidate in the district (in the head-to-head contests, I don't this this is crazy). If we add in Soong's 2.77%, then here's roughly what the picture looks like (Soong's 2012 vote varied a lot across districts, too, so this is a simplification):     

A bit less impressive: there are only six incumbents (of 32) who ran significantly ahead of the combined pan-blue presidential vote, and therefore would have won in districts where Tsai also won. There's just not a lot here from 2012 to indicate that the 40 KMT incumbents running in 2016, taken as a whole, have good odds of surviving if Tsai wins their districts, no matter how great their constituency service is. If it's like 2012, then we can expect about 20%, or eight, to run significantly ahead of the pan-blue presidential vote.

This is the main point that I tried--clumsily--to communicate in my previous post. Going into this analysis, I had a vague expectation that the KMT majority included quite a few districts that Tsai won in 2012 (that is, where LY vote of KMT > Ma + Soong), suggesting at least a plausible path to survival in this environment. (This stemmed from my own ignorance about 2012, not anything Nathan has written.) That's simply not the case, and unless 2016 is significantly different than 2012, this bodes very poorly for the survival of KMT legislators in districts on the 25-45 range on that list above.

Is 2016 going to be like 2012?
That leads me to the second issue: is 2016 going to be like 2012? Nathan argues that it won't be: the last election was a nearly perfect blue-green head-to-head fight, whereas 2016 will have a lot of disaffected pan-blue voters searching around for alternatives. And some of them will back Tsai, then turn around and vote for pan-blue LY candidates.  

Before I make my case for why I don't think this will be a large share of voters, a clarification: my goal here is to establish a baseline expectation for what district vote share DPP candidates will win with a given Tsai presidential vote share. So I'm focusing exclusively on the DPP side of the races. The mess of coordination failures on the pan-blue side is probably going to make this a conservative estimate, but again, I think it's useful to establish a generic partisan baseline first, before we start adjusting up or down, and it's much simpler to do that by starting with the DPP. 

Now, to the question about 2016. I expect Tsai's vote share and DPP LY vote shares will again be highly correlated in 2016. We know there are going to be a lot more Tsai supporters in 2016: some will be former or disaffected pan-blue voters, some will be independents, and some will be newly minted voters. Let's rank-order how likely green-blue split-ticket voting should be given the origin of these groups of Tsai voters:

1. Disaffected pan-blue voters.
2. Independents.
3. New voters (i.e. young people aged<24).

​Disaffected pan-blue voters are the most likely to cross over and vote for Tsai, then support their local pan-blue candidate in the LY race. (I'm going to leave aside the other two for the moment--I don't think either of these groups will do much ticket-splitting in the aggregate.) There are potentially a lot of blue-leaning Tsai voters. If most split their votes then DPP candidates are, indeed, going to run significantly behind Tsai in most districts, and she'll need a larger margin of victory to guarantee a DPP LY majority. But let me suggest three reasons why split-ticket voting may not be all that frequent even among this disaffected pan-blue population in the coming election. 

First is the shifting partisan identification of the electorate. Nathan wrote a very nice piece for the China Policy Institute blog about the shift in the number of pan-green vs pan-blue partisans over the last couple of years. (If you haven't read it yet, go do it--it's well worth your time.) The takeaway from that piece is that there are a lot fewer pan-blue identifiers now, and a lot more pan-green, than in 2012. How much? Well, instead of a 50-45 advantage in favor of the pan-blue, it's looking more and more from public opinion research like the ratio has flipped toward a green plurality. If we think about 2016 in this light, Tsai's increase in the polls is not entirely a protest vote against Ma and the KMT, but also reflects an increase in identification with the pan-green side of the political spectrum. It's difficult to estimate the size of that increase, but to the extent it's real it should help not just Tsai but DPP LY candidates, too.

Second is turnout. In the current environment, there are a lot of disgruntled pan-blue voters. They're presented with two presidential candidates, Chu and Soong, who aren't eliciting a lot of enthusiasm at this point. In addition, there's the little matter of how Chu ended up heading the KMT ticket: he arranged to have the previous nominee Hung Hsiu-chu dumped, and that angered her supporters within the party. It's not hard to imagine a significant chunk of the pan-blue side simply sitting this election out rather than casting a protest vote for Soong or Tsai. (There's also the matter of travel back from the PRC mainland to vote--it's costly for Taiwanese based there to do this, and the lack of a competitive race for president probably means many more of them will stay away.) If they do that, then those votes won't be there in the LY races either. 

Third is that the presidential and LY elections will be concurrent in 2016.  2012 was the first time that voters could cast a ballot for president and the legislature at the same time. Prior to that year, these elections were always held on different days, and often different years, which led to a significantly different electorate across these two types of races. In particular, presidential elections tended to have the highest turnout, with LY turnout 15-20% lower. I suspect, although I don't have the evidence at hand, that the KMT benefited the most from this lower turnout, because its resource advantages allowed it to push core supporters to the polls better than other parties. It's the kind of "hidden benefit" that can increase the size of the incumbency advantage and help sustain an LY majority for a long time even as the underlying nature of the electorate changes. But if the elections are held at the same time, this gap goes away. Just about everyone who shows up to vote in one election also votes in the other (unless they're deliberately boycotting something--see, e.g., the 2004 referendums). It's effectively the same electorate in both races.*

So while 2012 was a nearly perfect blue-green head-to-head contest, it's worth considering also the possibility that the close correlation between the presidential and LY elections that year was not exceptional, but more like a new norm. Like 2012, just about everyone who votes for president in 2016 will also vote for the LY. That means the fluctuation in turnout that we're used to seeing between presidential and LY elections will probably not be as stark going forward, and the likelihood that the presidency and LY will be controlled by different camps, as was true during the Chen Shui-bian era, will be lower from now on. (Note: I haven't looked much at the evidence here, and I'd be very interested to hear Nathan's and others' reactions to this speculation.)

For all these reasons, then, I think assuming a close correlation between Tsai's district vote share and the DPP candidate's in 2016 is a good way to start estimating how the legislative election will play out.

In future posts, I'll say something about the assumptions of a uniform swing, the complicating factor of separate yuanzhumin districts, and the PR seats. 

* I'm ignoring the fact that yuanzhumin (aborigine) voters don't vote in the same LY districts. In most cases this impact is minor, but in a couple districts they are 30% or more of the electorate. Since yuanzhumin voters have been to this point overwhelmingly pan-blue, this introduces a pan-blue bias into the forecast: I'm assuming those votes will be there in the LY races, which makes districts like Taitung or Hualien look a lot more blue than they really are. More on this in another post.