​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.

One of the major advantages the DPP has had over the KMT in this election cycle is its cooperative relationship with the smaller upstart parties on its flanks: the Taiwan Solidarity Union (台聯), the Social Democratic Party-Green Party (社會民主黨 － 台灣綠黨) alliance, and above all the New Power Party (時代力量).

The TSU is the DPP's traditional ally, and the two worked fairly closely together in 2012 to coordinate nominations: the TSU avoided running candidates against DPP nominees in the districts, and the DPP encouraged deep green voters to consider casting a party list vote for the TSU. That strategy paid off for the pan-green camp when the TSU won 8.96% of the party list vote, which returned it to the LY after a four-year absence. And in the districts, the DPP candidates won all but four constituencies that Tsai Ing-wen carried (and six that she didn't.)

Unfortunately for the TSU, it isn't looking so hot in the polls right now and probably won't win the five percent of the party list vote it needs to retain seats in the legislature. It's likely to be replaced by the NPP, which was founded only about a year ago and is running several high-profile candidates in district races. This could have been a major problem for the DPP: a new pan-green party with a strong pro-independence slant and brash leadership, targeting the same youth vote that the DPP is counting on to help it win a majority in the LY, and without a past history of coordination in elections.   

Instead, the DPP leadership recognized this threat early on and worked out a cooperation agreement: the party would yield several districts to the NPP (only three, as it turned out), and the NPP would only campaign in those districts to avoid splitting the pan-green vote elsewhere. The arrangement has worked well enough that Tsai Ing-wen is even showing up to appear with some of the NPP candidates.

The DPP has pursued a similar approach to cooperation with candidates from other groupings, yielding several other seats to small parties. Via Solidarity.tw, here's the list of small-party candidates the DPP has endorsed:  

• Taipei 3: Billy Pan (潘建志), Independent
• Taipei 4: Huang Shan-shan (黃珊珊), People First Party
• Taipei 5: Freddy Lim (林昶佐), New Power Party
• Taipei 6: Fan Yun (范雲), SDP-Green alliance
• Taipei 7: Yang Shih-chiu (楊實秋), Independent
• ​Taipei 8: Lee Ching-yuan (李慶元), Independent
• New Taipei 9: Lee Hsing-chang (李幸長), Independent
• New Taipei 12: Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌), New Power Party
• Taoyuan 6: Chao Cheng-yu (趙正宇), Independent
• Taichung 3: Hung Tzu-yung (洪慈庸), New Power Party
• Taichung 5: Liu Kuo-lung (劉國隆), TSU

11 seats seems like a lot to yield, right? Isn't this a costly signal that the DPP is willing to weaken its shot at a majority in order to defeat the KMT and forge a broad coalition in the LY? Well, let's step back and see just how crucial these seats are to a DPP majority. Here's the list of district seats ranked by how large Tsai Ing-wen's lead or deficit was in 2012, with the yielded districts marked in yellow (all of them are currently held by the KMT): 

Remember that the DPP needs about 41 district seats to win a single-party majority in the LY. Notice where almost all the yielded seats lie? Below #41. Waaaaay below, in fact. If some of these seats go to third-party candidates, the DPP is already going to have a majority all by itself.

I noted this in a previous post, but it's worth reiterating here: this is smart politics by the DPP. They're ceding races that are not very competitive to third parties and independents in exchange for non-compete agreements in the critical races in the 25-45 range. (In fact, this ranking probably understates just how difficult some of these seats are: Taipei is more reliably blue than the rest of the island, so the swing toward Tsai there is likely to be lower than elsewhere.)

How Much is One District Worth?
One "yellow" district is high up the list, though, and it's a very interesting one: Taichung 3 is ranked #30. What's going on there? The NPP has nominated Hung Tzu-yung, and the DPP is not running a candidate. Like the NPP candidates elsewhere, Hung is already a well-known figure in Taiwan: she is the sister of Hung Chung-chiu (洪仲丘), a military conscript who died in July 2013 as the result of harsh punishment by his superiors. (The incident triggered large protests, the resignation of the Minister of National Defense, and the rapid passage of a far-reaching reform of the military justice system.)

​By generic partisan lean, Taichung 3 is by far the most competitive district of any the DPP has yielded; a swing of just 2.33% toward Tsai would turn it green. If Hung can run anywhere close to Tsai's 2016 total in this district, she should win it easily. So, of the NPP candidates running for district seats, it's Hung, not Huang Kuo-chang (in New Taipei 12) or Freddy Lim (in Taipei 5), who is best positioned to win in 2016.

It's likely that the threat of NPP candidacies in critical races elsewhere gave them the bargaining power to get the DPP to yield Taichung 3, and as a result they're well-positioned to win at least one district seat, in addition to whatever they get from the party list. From the DPP's perspective, this is a good trade as well: they cede one competitive district for a full non-compete agreement everywhere else. And with one prominent exception, the deal has held. ​

The Curious Case of Hsinchu City
​That exception is Hsinchu City, where the DPP Legislative Yuan party caucus leader Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) is running against both the KMT nominee Cheng Cheng-chien (鄭正鈐), a city council member, and the NPP's Chiu Hsien-chih (邱顯智). Ker is widely disliked by the NPP's core supporters, and Chiu has refused to withdraw from the race, creating the possibility of a serious pan-green split in the vote. With a big enough swing (11-12%) toward Tsai, this seat could be competitive, but it's likely to be close even then, so Chiu's candidacy could well be fatal to Ker's chances.

What's especially intriguing about this race is the possibility of an ulterior motive for the NPP, and possibly some elements of the DPP, too. As party caucus leader, Ker is in line to be the next speaker of the LY if he wins re-election, and he's likely to try to block any meaningful reforms of the cross-party negotiation mechanism (政黨協商) that has given the current speaker, Wang Jin-pyng, tremendous influence over the legislative process. That in turn could prevent Tsai Ing-wen from getting much of her policy agenda through the LY. I have no idea if Chiu's campaign is a deliberate strategy to take out Ker, but from the NPP's point of view, preventing Ker from winning re-election might just be worth splitting the pan-green vote and throwing the seat to the KMT. Some of that animosity clearly comes from Ker's long history of deal-making in the LY and his role as the key DPP member in closed-door cross-party negotiations. For instance, it's easy to forget that he was actually at the center of the special influence case that caused the open rift between Wang Jin-pyng and Ma Ying-jeou--it was a case against Ker that Wang leaned on prosecutors not to appeal.

By the way, isn't it curious that Ker is fighting for re-election in such a tough place for the DPP? (Tsai lost here in 2012 by 21 points.) How did this happen to the party caucus chair?! Ker was previously a party-list legislator for two terms, so by DPP party rules he has to run in a district now. Unlike the KMT, which flagrantly violated its own rules to allow Wang Jin-pyng to run for a third time as a list legislator, the DPP didn't yield on this point. But why Hsinchu? Well, that's where Ker is originally from; he won several consecutive races there under the old SNTV system. Now that the electoral system has changed to single-member plurality, though, he's got a much tougher challenge.

I'm a bit surprised that Ker didn't manage to parachute into an easier district somewhere else. The fact that he's not only running in Hsinchu but also facing a challenge from the NPP suggests some significant opposition to him from elsewhere within his own party. But if he overcomes the odds and wins his race, he is going to owe Tsai Ing-wen very little, and he may have a political axe to grind with her or some other elements of the DPP for putting him in such a tough position. If he ends up as LY speaker, he could quite plausibly be a DPP version of Wang Jin-pyng during the Ma era: a powerful and independent-minded leader whose first priority is protecting his own interests, not those of the president or his party. Given how badly that turned out for Ma Ying-jeou and the KMT, this race could have an outsized impact on relations between Tsai and the DPP caucus in the LY after the election. It's worth watching closely. 

UPDATE 2015.12.30: Shortly after I wrote this, allegations of vote-buying were levied against the local KMT branch and its candidate, Cheng Cheng-chien, for holding a free public banquet in a local night market for KMT members and local residents. Pretty brazen, and stupid.  

In my previous post, I argued that the DPP's vote share in the legislative district races was likely to track Tsai Ing-wen's vote share fairly closely. From that basic intuition, I came up with a rank list of seats indicating how many districts the DPP would win with a given vote share for Tsai. That forecast rested on several assumptions:

1. There wouldn't be a very large incumbent advantage for KMT legislators;
2. Tsai's increase in vote share over 2012 would be uniform across districts;
3. The electorate voting for president would look essentially the same as that voting for the legislature.

I spent much of the last post defending assumption 1. Here I want to relax assumption 2, that Tsai's vote share is going to increase uniformly across all districts. That's certainly not going to be true in a technical sense, but to what degree will it be violated? The conventional wisdom about Taiwan's electoral geography is that the the north is more solidly blue than other parts of Taiwan, so the KMT's vote share will decline less in Taipei than in, say, Tainan or Pingtung. But how much less is hard to predict.

Let me put the punch line up front: I don't think Tsai's increase in vote share is going to vary much by locality. Evidence follows after the jump.

The Taiwan Democracy Project will hold its next seminar of the fall on December 1, in conjunction with the new U.S.-Asia Security Initiative at the Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford. The speaker is Cortez Cooper, a senior international policy analyst at the RAND Corporation. He will be speaking about potential changes in cross-Strait relations and China's security strategy in light of the upcoming 2016 presidential and legislative elections in Taiwan. The event is free and open to the public; you can register at the event page.

​The talk is entitled: "Of Paradigms, Politics and Principles: The 2016 Taiwan Elections and Implications for China’s Security Strategy and Cross-Strait Relations." Details are below.

Just about everyone with an interest in Taiwan has weighed in on the coming meeting between Ma Ying-jeou and Xi Jinping, abruptly announced on Tuesday. My own reaction: it's a big deal mostly for the symbolism, and there's not a lot of substance likely to come out of it. Thoughts in order:

1. This is not really about the 2016 elections in Taiwan. A lot of observers have suggested this is an attempt by President Ma and the KMT to influence the upcoming elections. I don’t think it is. The KMT is likely to lose the presidential election no matter what they do, in part because Ma Ying-jeou is a very unpopular incumbent. For the party to have a chance, the new KMT nominee Eric Chu needs to distance himself from Ma as much as possible. Ma’s meeting with Xi will knock Eric Chu off the front pages for a week and remind everyone that Ma Ying-jeou is still the president. I don’t see how that’s helpful to the KMT’s election chances.

2. This is a good thing for Taiwan's next leader. There's speculation that the meeting instead will serve to lock in the improvements in the cross-Strait relationship that have accrued under Ma, and somehow constrain Tsai Ing-wen's room to maneuver. Maybe, but I don't see how this will really harm a DPP president. Beijing is setting a precedent here for future meetings with whoever the directly elected leader of Taiwan is--note that Ma is meeting Xi as "Taiwan leader," not the chair of the KMT (a role he no longer holds), and the special emphasis on meeting as equals, right down to calling each other "Mr." and splitting the bill for the meal! That's a principle that adds to the legitimacy of the office of President of the Republic of China on Taiwan, and in turn makes it harder for Beijing to sustain the claim that a non-KMT president is illegitimate and that direct engagement is therefore inappropriate.  

3. This is less about Ma, and more about Xi. These kinds of events are often the result of years of diplomatic maneuvering. A meeting with Xi Jinping has been a goal of the Ma administration for several years. It would be a symbolically powerful capstone to his legacy of improving Taiwan’s ties with the PRC. In fact, it could have happened over a year ago at the 2014 APEC meeting in Beijing. From what I can tell, it didn’t because leaders in Beijing rejected the idea. For it to happen now suggests that something has changed on the PRC side of the relationship, not the Taiwan side. 

4. This is part of a larger diplomatic initiative by Xi. It’s useful to place this action by Beijing in a larger context. Xi Jinping recently completed a successful visit to the UK, and just last week premier Li Keqiang attended an important trilateral meeting with the leaders of South Korea and Japan in Seoul. Beijing also recently received a delegation from the Vatican. So the meeting with Ma fits into a larger pattern recent of conciliatory gestures by the Xi foreign policy team toward major players in the region and beyond. Again, it’s not as much about Ma as about what’s going on in Beijing.

5. The meeting will probably be long on symbolism, short on substance. The historical symbolism is striking, but the meeting is unlikely to have significant practical consequences. President Ma is not in a position to offer any meaningful concessions, and cannot credibly commit to any deals that might be struck, since he’d have to get them approved by the legislature, and he’ll be out of office in just a few months. The more important steps have already been taken: the leaders of the official agencies of the two sides—the Mainland Affairs Council in Taiwan, the Taiwan Affairs Office in Beijing--have already met in person before, and they communicate regularly. Under Ma, Beijing and Taipei have signed over 20 agreements to institutionalize aspects cross-Strait interactions. The fact that ordinary Taiwanese can get on a commercial flight in downtown Taipei and be in Shanghai in two hours is far more consequential than anything that is likely to come out of the meeting on November 7.  

On October 11, the Taiwan Democracy Project hosted Ian Rowen, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography at University of Colorado, Boulder. His talk was entitled, "The Sunflower Movement and the Future of Taiwan's Political Culture." The abstract and speaker bio are below. 

​Abstract 
Based on first-hand participant-observation, this talk will examine the culture, politics, and spatiality of the Sunflower Movement. Taiwan's most significant social movement in decades, the Sunflower Movement not only blocked the passage of a major trade deal with China, but reshaped popular discourse and redirected Taiwan's political and cultural trajectory. It re-energized student and civil society, precipitated the historic defeat of the KMT in the 2014 local elections, and prefigured the DPP's strong position coming into the 2016 presidential and legislative election season.
 
The primary spatial tactic of the Sunflowers-- occupation of a government building-- was so successful that a series of protests in the summer of 2015 by high school students was partly conceived and represented as a "second Sunflower Movement". These students, protesting "China-centric" curriculum changes, attempted to occupy the Ministry of Education building. Thwarted by police, these students settled for the front courtyard, where a Sunflower-style pattern of encampments and performances emerged. While this movement did not galvanize the wider public as dramatically as its predecessor, it did demonstrate the staying power of the Sunflower Movement and its occupation tactics for an even younger cohort of activists.

The Sunflower Movement showed that contingent, street-level, grassroots action can have a major impact on Taiwan's cross-Strait policies, and inspired and trained a new generation of youth activists. But with the likely 2016 presidential win of the DPP, which has attempted to draw support from student activists while presenting a less radical vision to mainstream voters, what's in store for the future of Taiwanese student and civic activism? And with strong evidence of growing Taiwanese national identification and pro-independence sentiment, particularly among youth, what's in store for the future of Taiwan's political culture? ​

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.

In what is becoming an annual tradition, our program is hosting a videoconference with President Ma Ying-jeou tomorrow, June 2nd, 2015. This year we'll be live, with a panel of Stanford faculty and fellows to engage with President Ma via the video link. We'll be joined by the Taiwanese ambassador, Shen Lyu-shun, and a delegation from Washington D.C. The speech and the following Q&A will be broadcast at several other locations around the country as well. Details and the link to the official event page are below. 

杯弓蛇影. A short note on the timing of this event: I've seen claims in the Taiwanese media and heard privately of suspicions that President Ma's speech at Stanford was planned to coincide with Tsai Ing-wen's trip to the United States, perhaps as a way to overshadow her visit. I understand that it is tempting to see some kind of nefarious influence at work in the timing here. But the real reason is a lot more mundane: June 2nd was when we could get a conference room large and tech'ed-up enough for this event, and that still worked for all the participants. The date was set long before Dr. Tsai's itinerary was finalized and publicly announced, and it certainly wasn't pre-determined in Taipei. Given the conspiracy theory fever that grips much political reporting in Taiwan, it was probably inevitable that somebody would conclude otherwise. But in this case, they're just wrong.

On March 9, the Taiwan Democracy Project hosted Lu-huei Chen, research professor and former director of the Election Study Center at National Chengchi University, Taipei. His talk was entitled "Electoral Politics and Cross-Strait Relations." The official event page is here.

Professor Chen is Distinguished Research Fellow at the Election Study Center and Professor of Political Science at National Chengchi University in Taiwan.  He is currently a visiting scholar of Top University Strategic Alliance (TUSA) at MIT. Professor Chen received his Ph. D. in political science from Michigan State University. His research focuses on political behavior, political socialization, research methods, and cross-Strait relations.  He has published articles in Issues and Studies, Journal of Electoral Studies (in Chinese), Social Science Quarterly, and Taiwan Political Science Review (in Chinese). He is the editor of Continuity and Change in Taiwan's 2012 Presidential and Legislative Election (in Chinese, 2013), Public Opinion Polls (in Chinese, 2013), and co-edited The 2008 Presidential Election: A Critical Election on Second Turnover (in Chinese, with Chi Huang and Ching-hsin Yu, 2009).

The local elections on November 29th in Taiwan were a resounding defeat for the ruling KMT, and a major victory for the DPP. Taiwan’s main opposition party captured seven county and city executives from the KMT, raising their total from 6 to 13 of Taiwan’s local jurisdictions. DPP mayors now lead four of Taiwan’s six special municipalities: Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan, and Kaohsiung. In addition, the nominally independent Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) received tacit DPP support for his successful bid for Taipei mayor, booting the KMT out of the mayor’s office there for the first time in 16 years. Only in New Taipei did the KMT manage to hang on, thanks in part to the personal popularity of the incumbent mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫).

Equally striking was the swing away from the KMT at lower levels, where the party’s candidates have traditionally been more insulated from national trends: the number of KMT councilors dropped from 419 to 386 (out of 907), and KMT township heads fell from 121 to 80 (out of 204).  The KMT now holds a majority on only 6 of 23 city and county councils—remarkable for a party that could once count on control of the vast majority of local offices to help it mobilize votes for national elections.  The consistent swing away from the KMT across every jurisdiction in Taiwan suggests that this was a “wave” election—unhappiness with the ruling party and its chairman, President Ma Ying-jeou, drove a national slump in KMT support that showed up in vote totals nearly everywhere. Indeed, this was arguably the KMT’s worst-ever performance in a local election: only 1997 comes close, and the fact that all local offices were on the ballot this year, including the special municipalities, makes this a more consequential defeat than that election. (These figures are drawn from a presentation I gave at a Stanford roundtable on December 2; the slides from that talk are available here.)

It’s a little late for me to weigh in on the debate over why the KMT fared so badly—plenty of other people have done that already, and the impact is rapidly fading into the past as Taiwanese politics churns along. Instead, in this post I want to look forward and ask: what does the 2014 election tell us about future election outcomes in Taiwan, especially the 2016 presidential race?  

2014 Is Not 2016
The unquestioned assumption in most commentary in Taiwan is that the KMT’s recent electoral rout bodes poorly for its chances in the coming presidential and legislative elections, now tentatively set for January 2016. Some commentators have argued that the 2014 result indicates a fundamental electoral “breakthrough” for the DPP, rather than a temporary shift away from the KMT due to recent scandals and the unpopularity of President Ma, and that the DPP should be the favorite going into 2016.

This is not self-evident. To see why, we need only look at the last time around. In the last local elections in 2009-10, the DPP’s candidates for county and city executives actually won more total votes than did the KMT: 5,755,287 to 5,463,570. That turned out not to presage a DPP victory in the presidential race in 2012: Tsai Ying-wen lost to Ma Ying-jeou 51.6% to 45.6%.

Why the big difference? One reason is simply that they were held at different times: Taiwan was in a major recession (as was much of the world) in 2009-10, whereas by 2012 economic growth had bounced back. Another is that the relative importance of factors affecting mass voting behavior in local elections is different from national ones: ideological positioning and the state of the national economy, among other things, are likely to play a stronger role in vote choice in 2016 than they did in the local elections. The personal qualities of the candidates matter, too, and there’s always the possibility of a third candidate emerging as a serious contender, as happened in the 2000 presidential election.

So, until we know who the candidates are, what platforms they'll run on, and how the economy is likely to be doing, we should be cautious about forecasting a win for either major party. Nevertheless, might the 2014 elections at least tell us something meaningful about the relative appeal of the DPP and KMT right now? If we assume all the other factors will cancel each other out, doesn't the last election tell us the DPP will enjoy a generic partisan advantage going into 2016?

Not necessarily, and the reason is turnout. In general, it's 10-15 percent higher in presidential elections than local ones. If these extra voters who show up at the polls in presidential elections disproportionately support the KMT, then the local results are going to give an underestimate of the KMT’s expected vote share in 2016. So it would be nice to know how much of the DPP's success is due to KMT-leaning voters staying home, versus the DPP winning more votes. To figure that out, we need to dig into the raw vote totals a little more.

Was the DPP's Win a Result of Blue Voters Staying Home?
Let’s start with the basic numbers. Here are the turnout figures for 2012 and 2014:

• 2012: 13,452,016 votes cast, or 74.4 percent of all eligible voters;
• 2014: 12,512,135, or 67.6 percent.

So if turnout is on par with the last presidential election, there will be roughly a million more voters in 2016 than there were in 2014. If those voters look just like the 2014 electorate, then the local election offers a good estimate for 2016. But the more the non-voters in 2014 differ from the voters, the more we need to account for these differences to get an unbiased estimate.

Now, how about the partisan breakdown? Here's the vote totals for each party in 2012 (presidential election) and 2014 (county/city executives):

• 2012: Tsai Ying-wen (DPP): 6,093,578
• 2012: Ma Ying-jeou (KMT): 6,891,139
• 2014: DPP candidates: 6,684,089*
• 2014: KMT candidates: 4,990,667
  

(*I'm counting Ko Wen-je in Taipei as a DPP candidate here; more on that in a moment.)

Notably, the DPP candidates (including Ko Wen-je) together polled almost 600,000 votes more than Tsai did in the 2012 presidential race, even as turnout declined! So while the KMT had a disastrous drop from 2012 to 2014, there was also a significant increase in support for the DPP in 2014 above and beyond its support in the presidential election. Clearly, this is not just a story about asymmetric turnout of each party's base supporters, with pan-Blue voters sitting this one out. Instead, the DPP appears to have made big absolute gains as well: the party's vote total in 2014 was only about 200,000 short of what Ma Ying-jeou won in 2012, in a higher-turnout election. 

(For those interested in digging further into the numbers, I've put all these data in an Excel file, which can be accessed below):