​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.

We're now four months away from the presidential and legislative elections in Taiwan, to be held on January 16th. At this point polls start to tell us something meaningful about how the election will turn out. To my eye, there are three things that stick out:

1. Taiwanese voters care most about the economy, and they overwhelmingly evaluate it as "bad."
A Taiwan Brain Trust poll that came out yesterday reports that about 64% of respondents named economic development as the primary issue in next year's elections--far outstripping government effectiveness (about 17%) and cross-Strait relations (only about 4.5%). 

Another poll from Taiwan Indicators Survey Research ll (TISR) that came out on Monday finds that an astounding 84% of respondents evaluated the overall state of the domestic economy as "bad" ("認為國內整體經濟狀況不好“); only 8% thought it was good. 

The headline numbers in both these polls focus on support for the three major candidates--Tsai Ing-wen, Hung Hsiu-chu, and Soong Chu-yu (aka James Soong). I think they're burying the lede. Economic conditions are a powerful determinant of election outcomes: in general, incumbents get the credit when people think the economic is doing well, and they get the blame when it is not--whether or not they actually have much control over economic outcomes at all. So the fact that most Taiwanese poll respondents are emphasizing the state of the economy, and that the large majority think it is bad, bodes very poorly for the KMT. (Note that this cannot just be Pan-Green supporters expressing discontent about the economy: this is 84% of all respondents. Dissatisfaction with the economy crosses party lines.) 

These results suggest that, like in the local elections in 2014, the KMT is going to be fighting a massive headwind. Even if they had a strong candidate (ahem, Chu Li-lun?) atop the ticket, I would expect them to lose with these numbers. With Hung Hsiu-chu as the nominee, and James Soong running yet another third-party campaign that's offering an alternative to Pan-Blue voters who don't like Hung, the presidential election already looks overdetermined. The KMT is going to lose, badly. And Tsai Ing-wen, by default, is going to win. 

At this point, though, I'd be very cautious about interpreting an impending DPP victory as anything other than a rejection of the KMT. There will inevitably be people in Taiwan and in Washington, DC who will frame this outcome as a repudiation of closer cross-Strait relations with the PRC, or an endorsement of Taiwanese independence. It's time to start beating the drum that the election is not about cross-Strait relations. It's not about independence or unification. It's not really even about a new "third force" of youth activism and social progressive politics. The 2016 election is about the economy. 
  

2. The KMT is really unpopular, but support for the DPP and Tsai Ing-wen is soft.
Dissatisfaction with the KMT is really high right now. Taiwan Brain Trust puts it at 71%, which is a significant improvement from December 2014, when the rate was 80%.

What is more surprising is that the DPP is still not very popular in absolute terms. Throughout 2015, the DPP has had higher negatives than positives in the Taiwan Brain Trust survey results. The most recent poll finds about 45% dissatisfied with the DPP, and 42% satisfied. That's actually a significant improvement as well; for polls in March, April, and June over half of respondents were dissatisfied with the DPP. The TISR results are more positive for both the DPP and KMT, probably because survey uses a "feelings thermometer" to rank the parties on a scale from 0 to 100: the DPP ranks slightly positively with a net score of 52.0, as compared to the KMT's 35.7. That's still not particularly strong given the circumstances. 

Tsai Ing-wen's polling support is also still short of 50%; TISR finds 43.6% of respondents intend to vote for her, which is a new high in recent months. Undecideds and those saying they won't vote combined are still 25% of the electorate. Taiwan Brain Trust puts it a bit higher, at 46.8%.

What this suggests to me, again, is that Tsai and the DPP are positioned to do well in 2016 mostly because they're not Ma Ying-jeou and the KMT. Given how widespread dissatisfaction with the economy is right now, they're going to win a lot of swing votes as the "lesser of two evils." 

3. The NPP might replace the TSU in the legislature.
The Taiwan Solidarity Union has three seats in the current LY. They're the deep green alternative to the DPP, and they've been struggling to hang on ever since the electoral system change in 2008 shut them out of the legislature. They need to pass 5% in the party list vote to get seats, which they did easily in 2012, winning 8.96%. They're currently polling at less than half that: they're at about 4.1% in the Taiwan Brain Trust poll. They're being outpolled now by the New Power Party (時代力量), at 6.8%, and James Soong's People First Party at 5.6%. 

There's a real possibility that the NPP takes a lot of votes from the TSU, passing the PR threshold while the TSU doesn't, and effectively replacing it on the deep green end of the political spectrum. It's notoriously difficult to poll support for small parties, so treat these as very rough estimates. The NPP is deliberately trying to appeal to young voters, who turn out at lower rates and are less predictable in their voting patterns than older generations. For another, the NPP is actually cooperating with the DPP in its district nominations--I'm not sure how this might affect the party list vote. 

(A third reason to be wary of the Taiwan Brain Trust numbers on the small parties: Hsu Yung-ming (徐永明), a professor at Soochow University, is both the polling director for the survey and now a legislative candidate for the NPP.)

There's a real danger here for the Pan-Green camp if their voters fail to coordinate in the party list vote: the Green Party and Social Democratic Party are running a joint list that may appeal to a lot of the same young, well-educated voters that the NPP is making a play for. They're currently polling at 1.8%, according to the Taiwan Brain Trust survey. It's not hard to imagine the NPP, Green-SDP, and TSU all pulling some Pan-Green support and each getting 3-4% of the PR list vote, leaving them all with no seats, while the PFP passes the threshold and wins several seats. If the district results end up closely split, the Pan-Green camp could even be denied a majority in the LY despite a significant advantage in the overall share of the vote. 

While I don't think it's particularly likely to happen, a Pan-Green win in the popular vote that leaves a Pan-Blue majority in control of the legislature would be a serious problem for Taiwan's democracy. So one thing I'll be paying close attention to in this election is how, or whether, this coordination problem is resolved in some way before the election.

Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) is now the official KMT nominee for president in 2016. She has a reputation as a deep-Blue partisan without a demonstrated ability to appeal to moderates. If that's true, it bodes poorly for the ruling party's chances. 

But is it true? This anonymous article at Thinking Taiwan* attempts to make that case by examining her district vote totals in elections to the Legislative Yuan, which is the most concrete data we have about her electoral appeal. (Hung was elected as a KMT member from Taipei County in 1989, 1992, 1995, 2001, and 2004, and on the KMT party list in 1998, 2008 and 2012; the actual numbers are available here, from the Election Study Center at National Cheng Chi University.) Good for the writer for actually trying to supply some hard evidence for this claim, but in truth these results tell us very little about Hung's mass appeal.

The reason is that pre-2008 LY vote returns are from multi-member districts, and all the major parties used vote equalization (配票) systems in these elections. Vote totals for Hung or any other LY candidate nominated by a party can't be taken at face value as an indication of popularity. To imply otherwise is poor analysis.

A Quick Primer on Elections under Single Non-Transferable Vote
To see why, let's take a step back and remember how parties campaigned in these districts. Until 2008, elections to the legislature were held using the Single Non-Transferable Vote (SNTV) system. SNTV is defined by:

• Multi-member districts, i.e. more than one representative will be elected from a single district;
• Voters can cast only a single ballot for only one candidate (not a party, and not multiple candidates);
• The top M vote-getters all win a seat, where M is the number of seats in a district. 

SNTV has a lot of features that make it unloved among electoral systems geeks, which is one of the reasons it was replaced for the legislature in Taiwan. (Nevertheless, it's still used for every other lower-level council election.) The most important is that it presents two serious coordination problems for the largest political parties, which increase in difficulty with the number of seats elected from a single district:

1. A nomination problem. Parties have to estimate prior to the election how much support they have in the district to know how many candidates to nominate. Nominate too few, and your nominees all win but with many votes to spare, and all the extras could have won you another seat. Nominate too many, and your votes will be spread too thinly, leading in the worst-case scenario to a shutout when you could have won several seats. This gets harder the less information parties have about their level of support. 
2. A vote distribution problem. To maximize the expected number of seats they'll win, parties have to get their supporters to distribute their votes as evenly as possible across multiple nominees. This can be a real challenge if one or two candidates are much more popular and well-known. If voters cast their ballots sincerely, then popular nominees will win with thousands of votes to spare, while lesser-known candidates from the same party will be overshadowed and lose.  

For instance, in 2004, the DPP nominated five candidates for the legislature in Tainan County, a district with eight seats. The party then told its supporters to cast a ballot based on the last number of the voter's national ID card (see above). All five DPP candidates won; here were their vote shares:

• (1-2) Lee Jun-yi 李俊毅: 9.28%
• (3-4) Huang Wei-je 黃偉哲: 8.56%
• (5-6) Yeh I-chin 葉宜津: 6.64%
• (7-8) Cheng Kuo-chung 鄭國忠: 10.01%
• (9-0) Hou Shui-cheng 侯水盛: 10.09%

Except for Yeh, that's what a randomization strategy will get you, if properly followed by your supporters: roughly even shares of the vote for all nominees, and they all get in. (Yeh won her seat despite not finishing in the top 8, because of the female quota rule; she bumped the 8th place candidate, the KMT's Kuo Tian-tsai (郭添財).) 

The randomization scheme is not a DPP innovation, by the way; the New Party also used this system in Taipei back when it was competitive. In general, the more ideological a party’s voters, the more appealing a randomization scheme is. 

In contrast, the KMT traditionally employed “responsibility zones” (責任區) within the larger districts: each official nominee was assigned some areas (usually groups of wards or villages) that were their exclusive zones to campaign in, and they were not supposed to appeal to voters in other areas.** The KMT also would hold back some of their so-called “iron vote” (鐵票) precincts—typically villages filled with military personnel, civil servants, and their families who could be expected to loyally support the party en masse. In the days leading up to the election, if a couple of the party’s candidates appeared to be doing worse than expected, the party strategists would at the last moment direct some of the iron vote to them to bolster their chances of winning. The responsibility zone system was used widely by the KMT in the 1980s and 90s because it worked well and gave them a systematic advantage: the party could exploit the advantages of its connections to local factions, its superior knowledge of local support levels, and its almost complete control of local ward chiefs and vote-brokers. 

You Can't Infer Candidate Appeal Solely from Election Returns under SNTV
So what do election results under this system tell us about Hung Hsiu-chu’s appeal as a candidate? Very little. Because the KMT imposed a vote distribution system in the LY elections, individual candidate vote totals are not a reliable indication of how popular the candidates are.

For instance, here’s her vote returns from the legislative election in Taipei County in 1992, by administrative area:

• Banqiao City: 2.33%
• Sanchong City: 0.89%
• Zhonghe City: 4.2%
• Yonghe City: 14.39%
• Xinzhuang City: 1%
• Xindian City: 4.52%
• Shulin City: 1.01%
• Yingge Township: 0.99%
• Sanxia Township: 1.55%
• Danshui Township: 2.08%
• Xizhi City: 1.06%
• Ruifang Township: 1.02%
• Tucheng City: 2.78%
• Luzhou City: 0.98%
• Wugu Township: 0.74%
• Taishan Township: 1.21%
• Linkou Township: 1.14%
• Shenkeng Township: 2.42%
• Shiding Township: 1.31%
• Pinglin Township: 3.95%
• Sanzhi Township: 1.37%
• Shimen Township: 0.91%
• Bali Township: 0.94%
• Pingxi Township: 1.59%
• Shuangxi Township: 0.56%
• Gongliao Township: 1.76%
• Jinshan Township: 0.68%
• Wanli Township: 2.43%
• Wulai Township: 5.82%

Now, a couple of things about 1992: it was the first election for the full legislature, and Taipei County was a single electoral district with 16 seats--huge, by SNTV standards. This was close to a worst-case scenario for political parties trying to equalize votes: there hadn't been a previous full LY election to provide info about each party's expected support, and the district magnitude (i.e. # of seats) is really high. An effective vote distribution system is critically important for party success, and also really hard to implement here. 

These results show Hung was much stronger in some areas than others (Yonghe, Zhonghe, Xindian, Wulai, and Pinglin stand out), but they don’t show where her responsibility zones were or if she needed help from the “iron vote.”  If I had to guess, I'd say she was assigned to Yonghe and parts of the four other cities she was strongest in: they're all clustered together just south of Taipei. But we can't tell that from the returns; and they also tell us nothing about whether she over- or under-performed relative to expectations.

The one thing we can say from these figures is how the KMT itself did. The last winner in this district was Chou Po-lun (周伯倫) of the DPP, who got 2.65% of the vote. Hung got 3.04%. Of the 17 KMT candidates, not all of whom were nominated, 10 were elected, with vote shares ranging from 2.66% to 5.89%, and the KMT won 62.5% of the seats with 45.7% of the vote. From the KMT’s perspective, that was a terrific result, and Hung’s share of the vote was just about perfect: safely above the cutoff point, but not too much above that a lot of votes were wasted. That tells us that Hung, and most of the other elected KMT candidates, probably played by the party’s rules. What it does not tell us is that Hung had no mass appeal, because demonstrating that wasn't her objective in this (or any of the other) LY elections. 

If critics want to cast Hung as a deep-Blue ideologue with no ability to win votes from moderates, fine. She hasn't shown that ability, it's true. But she also has never been asked to. Her past election results tell us very little about how she'll do as the KMT candidate for president. 

* From Solidarity.tw, apparently.
**A fun aside: this is one of the best-studied topics in Taiwanese politics research. Among the prominent work on this is from the current chair of the Central Electoral Commission, Liu I-chou, who wrote his dissertation on the KMT’s responsibility zone system. Also, a big chunk of Shelley Rigger’s Politics in Taiwan, one of the best-known English-language books on Taiwanese elections, extensively covers party strategy in SNTV elections.