Summing Up the Races

Going into this election cycle, the KMT holds 16 of 22 localities, the DPP holds 5 (Tainan, Kaohsiung, Chiayi County, Pingtung, and Penghu), and there is one independent (Kao Hung-an in Hsinchu City). As of late August, here are my ratings for the 22 executive races: 

Safe KMT (3): Nantou, Kinmen, Lienchiang

Likely KMT (3): Taipei, Taoyuan, Miaoli,  

Leans KMT (5): Taichung, Keelung, Hsinchu County, Yunlin, Hualien, Taitung, 

Toss-up (2): New Taipei, Penghu

Leans DPP (4): Yilan, Changhua, Chiayi City, Pingtung, 

Likely DPP (3): Tainan, Kaohsiung, Chiayi County 

Safe DPP (0): none  

Leans IND (1): Hsinchu City

 If we assign all the leaners and likely races into their respective camps, the DPP would have a net gain, and the KMT a net loss, of two, for a breakdown of 12-7, with one independent (Hsinchu City) and New Taipei and Penghu to be determined by coin flips. So the DPP is well-positioned to improve a little on 2022. Some more general observations follow.

(1) This is a sneaky hard election cycle for the KMT. Ever since Taiwan's local elections were consolidated into a single four-year cycle, the conventional wisdom has been that on aggregate they will turn out a lot like midterm elections in the United States: the party of the president loses seats. That was my starting assumption as well, and the implication was that the DPP would struggle this cycle since President Lai is not all that popular.

But there are several structural factors working against the KMT right now. First, they already control almost every winnable locality, including in places that are reliably green at the national level like Yilan, Yunlin, and Chiayi City. This time around they're playing defense. 

Second, the KMT doesn't have many incumbents running. Incumbency helps a lot at the local level, and the KMT won several of these races in 2022 because they had popular mayors running for re-election. Incumbents tend not to be challenged for the nomination by co-partisans and usually go into the general election with the full backing of the party, whereas open-seat contests often result in intra-party splits, renegade candidates, and factional defections. Most local executives are pretty popular, as well. It's just really hard in Taiwan to defeat an incumbent mayor absent a national partisan wave (which, to be fair, occurred both in 2014 and in 2018).   

In 2026, the KMT is defending a lot of open seats; 10, to be exact, in New Taipei, Taichung, Hsinchu County, Yilan, Changhua, Yunlin, Chiayi City, Hualien, Taitung, and Kinmen. By contrast, the DPP is defending only three: Tainan, Kaohsiung, and Chiayi County (although Penghu is technically in there too because of Chen Kuang-fu's health concerns). So the playing field is just less favorable to the KMT now than in 2022, and they could lose control of several localities even if the party's net support across all the races still outdistances the DPP.

Third, going into this cycle, the KMT faced a difficult coordination problem with the TPP. As I argued in a series of posts last year, I think these are make-or-break elections for the TPP's future. They need to demonstrate electoral appeal independent of the KMT, and they desperately need to win some local mayor's races  in order to improve their party brand, attract and cultivate new talent into the party, and convince pan-blue voters that they are a viable alternative to the KMT. And yet...

(2) TPP-KMT cooperation seems to be holding up well. Surprisingly well! Given the importance to the TPP's future of winning offices this November, and the spectacular failure of the presidential joint-nomination strategy in fall 2023, I expected the party would play hardball with the KMT over nominations. At a minimum, I thought Huang Kuo-chang would demand the KMT support him as the joint nominee in New Taipei in exchange for the TPP dropping bids elsewhere. 

But instead, the TPP has (mostly -- the exception is the Jhubei City race) stuck to their joint-nomination polling process. There are no blue-white splits in any of the county-level executive races this cycle, and the TPP's nominees have consistently stood down when they lost the joint polling primary. This has been especially beneficial to the KMT's chances. Of all 22 localities, the only joint blue-white nominee who's from the TPP is in Chiayi City -- very difficulty terrain for the blue camp. The KMT has also yielded in Hsinchu City, where the former TPP member Kao Hung-an is running for re-election. And in Chiayi County, both parties are supporting an independent, Wu Pin-jui. In the other 19 localities, the KMT is running a candidate with backing from the TPP.  

So there is much better coordination on nominees on the pan-blue side than I expected. KMT party chairwoman Cheng Li-wun deserves significant credit for working out that deal and getting the TPP to stick with it.

The corollary is that TPP party chairman Huang Kuo-chang is going to deserve a lot of blame for not getting more out of this cooperation agreement. 1 nominee in 22 races is not a great result. And he couldn't even get the KMT to yield in Jhubei City! 

(3) The DPP is well-positioned to improve, at least modestly, on their abysmal result in 2022, which would give President Lai a boost. I can easily imagine a scenario in which the DPP wins New Taipei, flips Yilan, Changhua and Chiayi City, and scores two or three upsets elsewhere: say Keelung, Yunlin, and Hsinchu County. That would be a really good result for the party, and it seems entirely plausible right now. 

The corollary is that Cheng Li-wun's position as KMT chair looks a little shakier than I thought it would when I started this exercise. The scenario above would be quite bad for Cheng -- maybe not "resign immediately" bad, but enough to erode her influence and dramatically increase the internal party pressure on her. Add in a loss in Hualien or Taitung or somewhere else unexpected, and Cheng probably can't survive as party chair.

On the other hand, a best-case scenario for the KMT (and worst-case for the DPP) would be for the party to win New Taipei in addition to Taichung, Taoyuan and Taipei, hold on to, say, Changhua and Yunlin and win back Penghu, and pull off an upset in Kaohsiung. Then Cheng Li-wun is riding high and strengthens her influence over the party's nominations for 2028. And Lai probably has to resign as DPP party chair and could even face an internal challenge for the presidential nomination. 

(4) The New Taipei race looms large. It's going to shape the narrative of this entire election cycle. If Su Chiao-hui wins there (she's leading in the latest mainstream poll), and the DPP holds on to the localities it runs now and adds pickups in 3-4 others, the narrative will be that the KMT blew it. If Lee Shu-chuan instead wins, it's a very different take-away: the KMT was playing defense and largely held its own.

So New Taipei is the big prize. It's the most populous locality in Taiwan, the DPP has never won it since it became a special municipality, it's got a close partisan balance, and if national issues are going to matter anywhere it will be here. I usually caution against reading too much into the local election results as a harbinger of the upcoming national elections, but this race may have outsized implications for 2028. 

(5) Issues...what issues? I realize I haven't talked a lot about issues in the campaigns and instead have focused mostly on candidate quality and factional politics. That's because in local elections there tends to be a split between the big metro races, where partisanship and national trends matter more, and the other city and county races where local ties and factional politics are more often decisive. This cycle looks like it's following that traditional pattern. 

At the central government level, most issues are linked to the interminable fighting between the KMT-TPP controlled Legislative Yuan and the DPP-controlled Executive Yuan. Oversight, nominations, and budgets have been the main areas of contention. On oversight, the TPP  has been hopping mad that prosecutors arrested Ko Wen-je in 2024, and he's now been tried and convicted. That's made them even less willing to consider engaging with the DPP and reinforced their decision to cooperate  with the KMT. On nominations, the two branches have escalated their confrontations to the point that the Constitutional Court, NCC, and Control Yuan are now all paralyzed. And on budgets, the KMT and TPP changed the revenue allocation formula to distribute a larger share to local governments (mostly controlled by the KMT) and away from the central government. They also delayed review of the FY2026 budget for eight months -- it finally passed in early August.

I don't see a whole lot of evidence so far that the consequences of the national-level stalemate are trickling down into local races in a way that would be decisive. The issues that have broken through in the mayor's races don't map neatly onto the partisan divide: a food safety scandal, transportation and economic development, disaster relief and flood control, and corruption. It's plausible that these could affect some of the metro races. For instance, in Taichung outgoing incumbent Lu Shiow-yen has taken criticism for the food scandal, and in Taipei Chiang Wan-an has been increasingly prominent as a critic of the central government over the same scandal. But in most of the other races these national issues don't look to be very salient. 

What about the China factor? It's there, for sure, but it's constant background noise in local elections. As we know from the electoral whiplash in the 2018-->2020 and 2022-->2024 cycles, the KMT's political liabilities as the China-friendly party matter a lot more when the presidency and control of the LY are at stake than they do in local mayor and councilor elections. 

(6) National Factors Seem Neutral

Right now President Lai's approval rating is about even -- the MyFormosa poll trend above shows him almost dead even as of May, 46-45%. It's notable that he's polling much better than last summer when the KMT won every single recall election. The national anti-incumbent waves of 2014 (Ma Ying-jeou) and 2018 (Tsai Ing-wen) both occurred when the president's popularity was low. So far Lai looks to be avoiding their trajectories, and that puts the DPP's candidates in a better position to make their case on their own merits. The party's brand isn't toxic like it was in 2018. 

The NCCU Election Study Center's party ID surveys are now out through June 2026, and they also show a national environment that is not bad for the DPP. Self-identified DPP partisans are up to about 34% of respondents -- that's near an all-time high. The KMT has recovered a bit from their near-record low in 2022 -- probably by pulling back some pan-blue respondents who were attracted to the TPP for a bit -- but they're still over 10 points behind the DPP. And the TPP is pretty clearly in decline, falling from 14% in 2023 to under 9% now. Adding up TPP and KMT partisans gets the pan-blue camp to 30%, close to but still behind the DPP. These data suggest a relatively steady state this election cycle: no signs of swelling or collapsing support for either camp. 

Finally, the economy is roaring: Taiwan's annual GDP is estimated to grow at about 11% in 2026. But the gains from that growth are very unequally distributed -- the high-tech sector is doing well on the back of the AI chip boom, while other sectors of the economy remain sluggish, housing costs remain high, and average wages in non-tech sectors remain low. There's not a lot of evidence the DPP is reaping broad political benefits from the tech boom, but neither do I see strong signs the KMT and TPP are capitalizing on economic frustration from those left out. 

Update 9.2. The August MyFormosa poll is out. The numbers are similar for President Lai; his satisfaction score is at 46% positive, 44% negative. 

From the same survey, the three political party ratings: 

1. DPP: 41.2% like, 44.5% dislike. Net -3.3 points
2. KMT: 27.2% like, 53.7% dislike. Net -26.5 points
3. TPP: 23.0% like, 57.4% dislike. Net -34.4 points

Those are not great numbers for any of the big three, but I'd much rather be in the DPP's position three months out.  

See also Part 1 (Introduction), Part 2 (The Big Six), Part 3 (North and Central), Part 4 (South, East, and Offshore Islands)

See also Part 1 (Intro); Part 2 (Big Six); Part 3 (North and Central); Part 5 (Summing Up); and Preview from 2022.  

Chiayi City - 嘉義市

KMT: Nominated Chang Chi-kai (張啟楷), a TPP member, as the joint KMT-TPP candidate on May 4. 

DPP: Nominated incumbent legislator Wang Mei-hui (王美惠) on October 22, 2025.  

Others: Three others, including Chen Kai-huang (陳愷璜), the former president of Taipei National University of the Arts. The perennial novelty candidate Huang Hung-chen Taiwan Ah Chen World Great Person Rich God President (黃宏成台灣阿成世界偉人財神總統) is also running here this cycle. 

T-PVI: G+4

Notes:

• Wang Mei-hui has been Chiayi City's legislator since 2020. She beat the previous DPP incumbent Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) in a party primary in 2019, and won with a little over 50% of the vote in both 2020 and 2024. Before becoming a legislator she was a city councilor (2005-2020). She's probably the strongest candidate the DPP could run here. 
• The TPP and KMT held a joint polling primary from April 2-4, and the former TPP at-large legislator Chang Chi-kai came out on top. Chang is the only TPP mayoral nominee to win the joint nomination of the KMT (Kao Hung-an is now an independent). 
• Chang is a long-time reporter and media personality who joined the TPP in 2023. He was listed 8th on the party list, and because the TPP did so well in the party vote he ended up in the LY as an at-large legislator for two years. He's clearly in the blue camp; he worked for blue-leaning media TVBS and CtiTV, and in 2010 joined Eric Chu's New Taipei election team. But he's not a career politician. 
• Popular incumbent KMT mayor Huang Min-hui (黃敏惠) (not to be confused with Wang Mei-hui the legislator) is term-limited out, and the KMT has a limited bench here to try to replace her. For the joint polling primary the party nominated Weng Shou-liang (翁壽良), a physician without much of a public profile. 

Polls: 

• 2026.4.24-30. TVBS survey finds Wang leading Chang 43-37%. 

Rating: Leans DPP. Wang is a strong candidate: she's effectively an incumbent since her legislative district is coterminous with Chiayi City. Chang is a bit unorthodox but has the benefit of a unified blue-white coalition behind him, and Wang's initial polling numbers aren't strong enough to predict a blowout here. But Chiayi is green-leaning, and the KMT has won it in the past only because Huang Min-hui's family is so politically influential. Huang's endorsement of Chang and participation in the campaign might make this more competitive; that same TVBS survey reports that Mayor Huang has 70%+ approval ratings, but only 40% of Huang's supporters would back the TPP's Chang. 

Results: TBD

Chiayi County 嘉義縣

KMT: No nominee; backing an independent candidate, Wu Pin-jui (吳品叡), the incumbent mayor of Puzi City. 

DPP: Nominated Tsai Yi-yu (蔡易餘), incumbent legislator in Chiayi District 1. 

Others: The TPP is also backing Wu. No others.

T-PVI: G+7 

Notes: 

• Incumbent DPP mayor Weng Chang-liang (翁章梁) is term-limited out. He's consistently ranked as one of the most popular local mayors and might be destined for a cabinet position in the Lai government after he completes his term. He's chairing Tsai's election campaign committee and throwing his organizational weight behind the DPP nominee.
• Tsai won the party's polling primary in January with what was reported as a 25+ point lead over anyone the KMT could field. He defeated county councilor Huang Jung-li (黃榮利) for the nomination.
• Tsai has racked up comfortable wins since his initial election to the legislature in 2016, although he ran several points behind the DPP ticket in 2016 and 2020. 
• This is the first time in KMT history that it has not run its own candidate in Chiayi County. The party center ultimately decided to back Wu instead, sparking some grumbling from KMT grassroots members that the party was giving up on an organizational presence in the county. 
• The KMT has not been competitive here since Chen Ming-wen (陳明文) defected to the DPP in 2001 and brought his faction (the Lin faction 林派) into the green camp -- his son, Chen Kuan-ting (陳冠廷), now holds the Chiayi County 2 LY seat. Tsai is referred to in news sources as a DPP "party loyalist" and not part of the Lin faction, although he has been a mentee of Chen Ming-wen and has Weng's backing, and Weng was on the Lin faction side of a bitter dispute between Chen Ming-wen and the previous DPP magistrate Chang Hua-kuan (張花冠) in 2018.  
• Tsai Wu was initially reluctant to run after the KMT backed her, and she took a few weeks to declare her candidacy. She announced on July 5 and was joined on stage by KMT at-large Legislator and 2022 nominee Wang Yu-min (王育敏 Alicia Wang), the incumbent Chiayi City Mayor Huang Min-hui, and TPP's Chiayi City nominee Chang Chi-kai. 

Polling:

• TBD - nothing since the DPP polling primary in January. 

Rating: Likely DPP. Chiayi County is second only to Tainan as the greenest locality in Taiwan. The KMT hasn't outright won the county mayor's race since 1993 1997. So this is a good place to embrace an "Opposition Grand Alliance" (在野大聯盟), as they've branded the effort. Still, given the historic patterns and Chiayi County's deep green shade, it would be a monumental upset for Wu Pin-jui to prevail here.  

Results: TBD

Yunlin 雲林縣

KMT: Nominated at-large legislator Chang Chia-jun (張嘉郡) ) on February 6, 2026.  

DPP: Nominated incumbent legislator Liu Chien-kuo (劉建國) in November 2025. 

Others: Two others.

T-PVI: G+4

Notes: 

• I'm going to reuse some material from the 2022 preview since the matchup is very similar...
• Incumbent mayor Chang Li-shan (張麗善) is term-limited out. Chang Chia-jun is her niece and the daughter of Chang Jung-wei (張榮味). That makes her the leading light of the next generation of the Chang family, the most powerful political family in Yunlin. Chang Jung-wei (張榮味) won two terms as Yunlin County magistrate, in 1999 and 2001. He was convicted of vote-buying in the 1994 county council council election, but only exhausted his court appeals in 2005 and was removed from office then. He was later sentenced to prison for accepting bribes in a case related to the construction of the Mailiao incinerator plant, and was in prison from July 2018 to May 2021. The Chang family has maintained considerable influence in Yunlin through local agricultural cooperative associations. 
• Factional politics in Yunlin are complicated, and to add to the confusion, everyone seems to be named Chang (張). The Chang Jung-wei faction which Chang Chia-jun comes from has sometimes been allied with the KMT, and sometimes independent. Even members of Chang Jung-wei's family have sometimes fought against one another in elections here. 
• Chang Chia-jun studied in the UK (degrees from UCL and Southampton Univ) and then got an early start in electoral politics: she was elected to the LY in 2008 when she was only 27. She was then district legislator from Yunlin 1 from 2008-2016, did not run for reelection in 2016, ran but lost to incumbent Su Chih-fen (蘇治芬) in 2020, then rejoined the LY on the party list in 2024. 
• Liu Chien-kuo is a long-time legislator from Yunlin's 2nd District. Liu got his start on the Yunlin County Council, first winning a seat in 2002. He gained national attention in 2008 when he ran for the legislature in Yunlin 2, lost, then accused his opponent Chang Sho-wen (張碩文) of the KMT of vote-buying. Chang lost the case and was stripped of his seat in 2009, and Liu won the by-election to replace him. He's represented Yunlin 2 ever since. He's not named Chang so he's got that going for himself at least.
• Liu was also the nominee in 2022, and lost narrowly (by about 40k votes) after getting a late start on the campaign. The DPP has been determined to give him a better shot this time and decided on his renomination by November 2025.

Polls: 

• 2026.3.23-28. BigMedia News group poll conducted by Pearson Data found Chang at 49.5%, Liu at 39%. 

Rating: leans KMT. Chang is well-positioned to carry on the family legacy in Yunlin. She's got significant electoral experience and the full backing of her family's political networks, including the support of her aunt, the outgoing (and popular) incumbent. Liu is a solid candidate for the DPP and has a political base in the inland areas that his constituency covers, but he needs to build a stronger campaign organization in the coastal areas of Yunlin 1 that Chang used to represent. Yunlin leans green at the national level but factional politics here are still often decisive.  

Results: TBD

Pingtung 屏東縣

KMT: Nominated Su Ching-chuan (蘇清泉), the party's 2022 nominee. 

DPP: Renominated incumbent mayor Chou Chun-mi (周春米) on February 4. 

Others: None.

T-PVI: G+6 

Notes: 

• This race is a rematch of 2022. Then, Su nearly pulled off a big upset, ultimately losing only 49-47% (~11,000 votes). He was pretty salty about it, too, and tried to challenge the results. This is Su's third try at the mayor's office, and this time around he is focused on Pingtung's low GDP/capita and claimed economic stagnation -- it's a mostly agricultural county that is not connected to the HSR system on the west coast, so it's been left out of the high-tech boom. 
• Chou won a three-way contest for the party primary in 2022, and barely held on in the fall election, so she's not a shoo-in. But her approval numbers are now pretty good, and it's always hard to beat an incumbent mayor where the partisan lean already favors them, absent a national wave.
• Pingtung has been trending a bit away from the DPP over the last couple election cycles, and there are some scattered signs of shakiness at the local level: party-backed candidates lost two township mayor by-elections in July 2025 and January 2026. Under Chou's watch Pingtung has also suffered from a couple of public-safety incidents -- the Ming Yang factory fire in 2023 and the Antai Hospital fire in 2024.
• Su founded Antai Hospital, and after initially deferring charges, prosecutors in June indicted him for illegally expanding the building's power supply, which allegedly was a cause of the fire which killed eight bedridden patients. 
• Unlike 2022, when the NPP ran a candidate who took 4% of the vote, there's no third party candidate so far. That probably favors Chou, and it's a good sign that the factional battles of the previous election are behind her for now. 

Polls: 

• The polls were notoriously off here in 2022; they badly underestimated Su's vote share, in some cases by 20 points or more. Treat all polls with some skepticism these days, but especially here given that it's the same two opponents again, and Pingtung may just be especially hard to poll. 
• That said, no polls from reputable sources yet. 

Rating: leans DPP. Under normal conditions I'd predict a popular DPP mayor running for reelection in a green-leaning county would be a likely win. But this is a rematch, and the 2022 result suggests this could be close again. On the other side of the ledger, Su is now also facing a criminal charge that could complicate his campaign, and Chou appears to have united the DPP behind her this round. 

Results: TBD

Hualien 花蓮縣

KMT: Nominated Yu Shu-chen (游淑貞) on March 4.

DPP: No nominee; may back an independent.

Others: Chang Chun (張峻), Wei Chia-hsien (魏嘉賢), Labor Party candidate Lo Pei-chin (羅佩秦). 

T-PVI: B+18

Notes: 

• The story here has to start with Fu Kun-chi (傅崐萁), Hualien's current legislator. The incumbent mayor Hsu Chen-wei (徐榛蔚) is the wife of Fu, and took over after he was convicted on final appeal of insider stock trading and forced to leave office in 2018. She got appointed in his place won the race to succeed him. (They previously divorced in 2009 to attempt to get around Taiwan's anti-nepotism law when Fu was originally charged, then remarried in 2016 [h/t Ben Read]). Hsu is finishing her second term this year and cannot run again, ending, for now, what The Reporter (報導者) calls the "Fu family dynasty." Since Fu first won the Hualien magistracy in 2009, he and Hsu Chen-wei have together held the office for four terms spanning nearly 17 years, a record. Fu himself has served a prison term, rejoined the KMT, gotten elected to the LY, and become the KMT's legislative caucus whip where he's now a major (and deeply problematic) political force.
• The Fu clan has publicly supported Ji'an township head Yu Shu-chen (游淑貞) for the nomination. Yu won the KMT's internal polling primary in January and was duly nominated by party center on March 4. 
• HOWEVA, two other pan-blue figures are challenging her outside the party nomination process. County council speaker Chang Chun (張峻) left the KMT after being denied the speaker nomination under the party's "anti-black-gold clause" (he had a previous vote-buying conviction overturned on appeal) and is running as an independent. He's been joined by county councilor Wei Chia-hsien (魏嘉賢), also formerly KMT but expelled after defying party orders and running for a council seat four years ago. 
• The DPP hasn't nominated a candidate here, and it appears to be leaning towards backing Chang since he actively supported the recall election in Hualien last year. But according to polling from multiple outlets, Wei probably has the broader appeal and is the stronger candidate against Yu. 
• Update 8.31: Wei Chia-hsien's two brothers are also important figures in local politics. Wei Chia-yen (魏嘉彥) is the incumbent mayor of Hualien, and the KMT refused to formally renominate him because Wei Chia-hsien violated party discipline. Wei Yu-cheng (魏鈺晟) is a Hualien City representative.  

Polls: 

• 2026.3.18-20. My Formosa poll pits each of the independents against Yu, finds Wei ahead of Yu 35-31%, but Chang behind 28-44%. 
• 2026.7.21-23. TVBS article citing a Storm Media poll, finds a three way race: Yu in the lead with 30%, Wei with 22%, Chang with 12.5%. 

Rating: leans KMT. I did not expect to find such an interesting race here. Fu Kun-chi has dominated the county government for most of the last two decades, but it's not self-evident he can transfer his influence to a newcomer. A lot depends on who the DPP ultimately decides to back; do they go for principle or pragmatism? If it's Wei they ultimately end up supporting, then this could well be a toss-up. 

Results: TBD

Taitung 台東縣

KMT: Nominated Wu Hsiu-hua (吳秀華) on December 24, 2025

DPP: Nominated indigenous Lowlands legislator Chen Ying (陳瑩) on October 22, 2025.

Others: Two others; former DPP legislator Liu Chao-hao (劉櫂豪) publicly bowed out on July 31. 

T-PVI: B+16 

Notes: 

• The incumbent, Yao Ching-ling (饒慶鈴 sometimes spelled Rao instead of Yao), is term-limited out, so this is another open seat the KMT is defending. 
• Wu is the incumbent county council speaker. She's the sister of former magistrate candidate Wu Chun-li (吳俊立), who took office in 2005 and then was immediately suspended for being convicted of a corruption charge. He tried to divorce and then appoint his wife as his replacement, but the MoI ruled that move illegal and appointed a replacement instead. His ex-wife Kuang Li-chen (鄺麗貞) then won the by-election for the office in 2006, and served one term. Just within the past year, Wu Chun-li is in fresh legal trouble for a stock manipulation case.
• Wu Hsiu-hua has her own corruption rumors; she's been linked to a road-widening scandal that Taitung prosecutors are investigating. (County council speakers often have a lot of influence over local public works decisions). 
• Chen Ying is a strong candidate for the DPP in a race it's never won before. She has been one of three lowlands indigenous representatives in the legislature since winning in 2016 in an upset, and she's the first DPP member ever to win one of the reserved indigenous seats (update: she was first elected in 2004). About 25% of the electorate in Taitung is indigenous, so that background helps her chances. More important, her father Chen Chien-nien (陳建年) was Taitung County magistrate from 1993-2001 as a KMT member, and he was the first person with indigenous status ever to serve as city or county executive. His old networks have helped sustain Chen Ying's political career. (On the less positive side, he also was convicted of vote-buying during Chen Ying's first run for the LY in 2004). 
• The DPP faced a coordination challenge here when Liu Chao-hao, the former DPP legislator from Taitung (2016-2024), indicated he wanted to run for county magistrate again. That would have been the seventh (!) time he's tried for that office; he lost the other six attempts including the by-election against Kuang Li-chen in 2006. There was a concerted effort by party heavyweights to get him to drop out of the race, apparently involving key southern DPP power-brokers Chen Ming-wen and Chuang Jui-hsiung (莊瑞雄); Liu finally announced on July 31 that he would not run. Tsai Ing-wen herself then came to Taitung to seal the deal and appear with both Chen and Liu in a demonstration of party unity. 

Polls: 

• 2026.5.27-28. CNEWS poll reports two results:
• Three-way scenario: Wu Hsiu-hua 44.2%, Chen Ying 15.0%, Liu Chao-hao 13.4%, undecided 27.4%
• Two-way scenario: Wu Hsiu-hua 51.3%, Chen Ying 22.4%, undecided 26.3%

Rating: Leans KMT. Start with the fact that Taitung is very blue -- Hou Yu-ih won 50% of the vote here in 2024, compared to 33.5% nation-wide -- and add the fact that a DPP candidate has never won the county executive election. That makes any KMT nominee the strong favorite in a two-way race.

But there are some glimmers of hope for the DPP nonetheless. For one, the partisan divides that seem so fierce to observers in Taipei are far shallower in Taitung. The current magistrate, Rao Ching-ling, is an "old friend" of Chen Ying and has had warm things to say about her, despite their different party affiliations. And Chen Ying and Wu Hsiu-hua aren't exactly enemies, either. Politics within indigenous communities are also complex, and Chen Ying's demonstrated ability to win over indigenous voters who are normally hostile to the DPP is a real asset. The DPP has also done surprisingly well here in the LY races recently, thanks to Liu Chao-hao's over-performance (although the Taitung LY district excludes indigenous voters).

Wu has some family baggage and a brewing corruption scandal of her own. All in all, it's probably not enough to deny her a win. Probably. 

Penghu 澎湖縣

KMT: Nominated Hu-hsi Township head Chen Chen-chung (陳振中) in April 2026. 

DPP: Renominated Chen Kuang-fu (陳光復); drafted his wife Wu Shu-chin (吳淑瑾) to replace him on June 17. 

Others: Four (!), and three are notable political figures. Former Magong mayor Yeh Chu-lin (葉竹林) is again running as an independent. Former deputy magistrate Hsu Chih-fu (許智富) and current TSU chair Chou Ni-an (周倪安) also declared for the race.   

T-PVI: B+2

Notes: 

• Incumbent DPP mayor Chen Kuang-fu had a fall on February 17, 2026, suffering a hemorrhage and falling into a coma. He's been in intensive care ever since. He had already gotten the DPP's nod for reelection, but given his condition, the party drafted his wife Wu Shu-chin (吳淑瑾) to run in his place.
• Chen is the only DPP member ever to win the mayor's office in Penghu; he first won in 2014, then was defeated in 2018, then snuck back into office in 2022 when two KMT candidates split the pan-blue vote. The Penghu legislator is a 4-term DPP member, Yang Yao (楊曜), but he's repeatedly turned down entreaties to run for mayor. Other than those two, Penghu has historically voted pretty blue. 
• With Chen incapacitated, the DPP scrambled to find a substitute, cycling through several options before settling on Wu as the path of least resistance. 
• The KMT named Hu-hsi Township head Chen Chen-chung (陳振中) as its nominee without controversy. The problem for them is that Yeh Chu-lin is also running again. He's a former KMT member and mayor of Magong, the largest city in Penghu, who in 2022 registered for the election on the last possible day and then got enough of the pan-blue vote to throw the election to Chen -- the final split was 36-33-30%. That could happen again this year.

Polls: 

• 2026.7.14-8.3 ETToday poll has Chen in the lead, 30% to Wu's 21% and Yeh's 18%. 

Rating: Toss-up. It's too hard to know just yet how this  three-way race will shake out, especially given Wu's late entry into the campaign. There might be a sympathy vote for her husband. Yeh might stay competitive, or end up abandoned by voters if he's clearly in third place.  

Results: TBD

Kinmen 金門縣

KMT: Formally nominated incumbent legislator Chen Yu-jen (陳玉珍). 

DPP: No nominee. 

Others: Former mayor Yang Chen-wu (楊鎮浯) is running without the KMT nomination a withdrew on the last day. That leaves current deputy mayor Li Wen-liang (李文良) as the main competition. Five (!) others. 

T-PVI: B+32 

Notes: 

• So here's where the three-cornered races (三腳督) are hiding this cycle. Where the DPP is too weak to field a competitive candidate, things get old-school -- the patterns here (and in Hualien) look a lot like the pre-1990s era elsewhere in Taiwan. 
• The incumbent mayor Chen Fu-hai would have been eligible for re-election...except that he's not because of an amendment to the Elections and Recall Act passed in 2023 (the so-called anti-black gold clause 排黑條款) that permanently bars anyone convicted of taking bribes from holding elected office -- and he has an old conviction from the 1990s. He's attempted to pass the torch to the next generation by supporting his son, Chen Chi-hsiang (陳麒翔), for county council. 
• The KMT party center nominated Kinmen legislator Chen Yu-jen, who has already deferred running for this office twice before. She's vowed not to yield the nomination again. 
• Former incumbent Yang Chen-wu (楊鎮浯) lost the nomination procedure but is running anyway, in fine Kinmen tradition. He has a rivalry with Chen Yu-jen that got more personal in the 2024 legislative election, when he refused to support her reelection and endorsed a TPP challenger. He also is a rival of Chen Fu-hai, who he beat by 800 votes in 2018, then was defeated by in 2022. 
• Deputy mayor Li Wen-liang (李文良) has also declared he's running, and has gotten support from Chen Chi-hsiang.
• The DPP has considered parachuting in a candidate here -- current at-large Legislator Chen Pei-yu (陳培瑜) is one name floated in some sources -- but still hasn't nominated anyone. 

Rating: Safe KMT. The only question is which KMT candidate will win this Battle Royale. 

Results: TBD

Lienchiang County 連江縣

KMT: Nominated incumbent mayor Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) on June 8, 2026. 

DPP: No nominee. 

Others: KMT member Tsao Erh-yuan (曹爾元) is running an independent campaign again, like in 2022. 

T-PVI: B+33 

Notes: 

• Mayor Wang has the party center's nod since he's an incumbent eligible for re-election. This race will be a rematch of 2022, when Wang won 51-42% over Tsao.
• In 2022, the DPP member Lii Wen (李問) made a valiant attempt to build the DPP's appeal here by running a no-hope campaign for mayor; he got 7% of the vote. With that as the last data point, it's going to be hard to convince anybody else to run on the DPP label here.

Rating: Safe KMT. Two candidates running, both will keep the local government in KMT hands. 

Results: TBD

See also Part 1 (Intro); Part 2 (Big Six); Part 3 (North and Central); Part 5 (Summing Up)

What's This?

In the run-up to Taiwan's 2022 local elections, I put together a set of previews on the local mayor's races to help me track the campaign. I've done that again here for 2026. 

Part 1. Introduction -- see below.

Part 2. The Big Six

Part 3. North and Central

Part 4. South, East, and Offshore Islands

Part 5. Summing Up. 

Introduction

Taiwan's local elections will take place on November 28, 2026. There are contests for over 10,000 different offices, ranging from the mayor of Taipei all the way down to village chiefs in indigenous communities in rural Taitung. In Taiwan these are often called the "9-in-1 elections" (九合一選舉) because they combine voting for nine different types of offices, most of which used to be held at different times, in one single campaign and election day held once every four years. These are:

• (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). 

This consolidation of election terms and cycles has turned local elections into something like a U.S. federal midterm election. It's obviously a big deal in local politics -- all of Taiwan's elected offices except for the president and the legislature are up for grabs. But it's also a big deal for all three parties that hold seats in the legislature right now, and there are some important if indirect implications for the 2028 races and for the current national political stalemate. 

What's at Stake for the Political Parties?

The Electoral Rules

Elections in Taiwan are handled by the Central Election Commission following the Public Officials Election and Recall Act. Some key dates for the 2026 elections: 

• August 20, 2026: CEC issues the formal election announcement
• August 31: candidate registration opens
• September 4: candidate registration closes
• October 23: candidate ballot order determined by drawing lots
• November 8: voter rolls finalized
• November 13: official campaign period for the special municipality mayors races begins
• November 18: official campaign period for county/city mayor, councilors, township heads, indigenous district chiefs begins. Polling blackout begins. 
• November 23: campaign period for local representative (ward/village head, township reps, indigenous district reps) begins 
• November 28: Election Day 

A few notes about the campaign process for those who aren't familiar with the way elections are practiced in Taiwan.

(1) Restrictions on campaigning aren't really enforced in practice. Despite the official campaign period being only 15 days long for mayors, and even shorter for the other offices,  Taiwan has pretty liberal free speech and advertising regulations that override these limits, and candidates have been putting up billboards and out campaigning for months already.

(2) There's a weird twist in Taipei, which in 2022 passed its own ordinance limiting campaign billboards anywhere in the city. This rule is quite a bit stricter than the national standard and moves Taipei incrementally closer to the tight electoral regulatory regimes in place in Japan and especially Korea. (That's not a good thing.) The Taipei ordinance:

• permits campaign advertisements only on official public campaign boards, party and campaign offices, and vehicles;
• defines a campaign advertisement as a poster, banner or billboard having at least three of the following five items: name, image, ballot number, campaign item, and slogan or trademark; and
• applies to everyone, including private individuals not employed by any candidate or campaign.

But it's also full of loopholes -- in 2024 it did little to limit campaign advertising for the 2024 elections. An obvious way to skirt it is to include only two of the five items on any given poster. There is also lax enforcement -- it requires someone to make a complaint before the city government will investigate. And it's also vulnerable to a constitutional challenge (if and when the constitutional court is functional again), not least since it restricts all displays of campaign posters, even on one's own property. (That's even stricter than Japan's rules.)

Nevertheless, this is something to watch this election cycle, as a huge challenge for candidates is to get their names out to uninformed and disengaged voters, and billboards, flags, and posters have long been a key part of this effort. This is the first time local elections in Taipei have been held under this new rule, so it's untested, and advertising is much more important in the low-salience council and ward races than in the legislative and presidential contests.  

(3) Taiwan has a polling blackout period that is strictly enforced. No one can publish or share polls from 10 days before the election through Election Day. Taiwan is a poll-crazy place, and this restriction is intended to prevent last-minute polls from affecting voting behavior. The CEC can impose heavy financial penalties on violators, and the blackout is generally respected. We'll see if that remains true this cycle. 

(4) There will be at least three referendums only one referendum. The legislature approved three to send to the voters, on:

• introducing caning as a criminal punishment;
• abolishing the government’s 'nuclear-free homeland' policy;
• using traffic fines to improve road safety.

At one point the KMT and TPP were discussing using their legislative majority to refer up to 10 different referendum questions to the voters. Since the legislature also changed the law back to require referendums to be held the same day as the local elections -- reversing a DPP change introduced after a voting fiasco in 2018, which itself was a consequence of a previous DPP-enacted change to the referendum law -- there is a danger that the voting and counting process will get bogged down again. The current CEC chairman You Ying-lung (游盈隆) pleaded with the LY for several months to cut down the number of questions to make the process run more smoothly. And on August 14, they did.  

Update 8.28: And then, on August 28, the CEC met and rejected two of the three! Wow. The CEC has decided that the caning and traffic fines proposals don't meet the requirements of the Referendum Act. The CEC unanimously rejected the caning referendum on the grounds that it requires a change to the legal code and violates the UN's ICCPR and ICESCR (both adopted into Taiwanese law, by the way, by a KMT-run legislature in 2009). "Unanimous" is important there, because three of those seven members (the chairman You didn't vote) were nominated by the KMT and TPP in a deal with the Lai administration back in April. On the other proposal, to allow traffic fines to be reserved for road-related purposes, the committee split 4-3. I'm guessing the four who rejected it were all DPP appointees, and the 3 who supported it were the new commissioners approved by the KMT and TPP.  

This is, to my knowledge, the first time the CEC has exercised its discretion to block a referendum question. And it will undoubtedly come up when new CEC commissioners are nominated and the LY is asked to approve them. The CEC needs at least 5 members to meet its quorum, and 8 of 11 seats are filled right now -- but the terms of four will expire in November 2027, right before the 2028 elections. That means unless the LY and EY can agree on at least two new appointees before then, the CEC could be paralyzed (like the Constitutional Court, and the Control Yuan, and the NCC) in the middle of administering the 2028 elections. 

I hope I'm wrong about this, but the way the CEC is structured could create a democratic crisis in about a year. The Lai administration's initial nominees were submitted as a package deal along with the KMT and TPP nominees in April, and then the opposition ignored the deal and voted down the DPP's candidates while approving their own. The EY already submitted replacement nominees once, and in July they once again were rejected by the LY majority. The opposition parties could well take an even harder line on replacement nominees as a result of the CEC's actions today. This stalemate HAS to be broken before November 2027...

(5) Taiwan still does not have an absentee, mail-in, or early voting. This puts a disproportionate burden on young people, active-duty military personnel, and anyone else who isn't living at their official household to return there to vote. It's been a long-standing complaint that has never been addressed, even during COVID. 

(6) The electoral system is SMD-P for executive races, and SNTV for councils. 

For the mayor, township head, and village/ward chief elections, the winner is decided by simple plurality rule. But for council and township and indigenous district representative seats, Taiwan still uses the old single non-transferable vote system (SNTV) in multi-member districts (複數選區). This system has an important implication for partisan competition: the electoral threshold of exclusion is much lower than in the executive races, and small parties can be competitive for a seat by winning 10% of the vote or even less in some districts. That means the usual KMT-DPP duopoly in mayor's races is weakened in local races, and small parties enjoy a more forgiving electoral environment than in elections to the Legislative Yuan. 

Traditionally, independent candidates have also fared well in local councilor races. Another truism of Taiwan politics is that the lower down one goes in the hierarchy, the less partisan affiliation matters, so that most village and ward chiefs (~90% in the last election) register as independents. 

(7) Gender quotas still apply in the STNV races. Gender quotas have been a part of Taiwan's electoral regime going back to the original ROC constitution, with the quota increasing in the democratic era. Since 1999 it's been a 25% requirement -- i.e. at least one of every four seats in a district must go to a woman. If one of the top four vote-getters is already a woman, nothing changes; if none is, the fourth-place male candidate is displaced by the top female candidate. This rule only kicks in if the district magnitude is at least four, which in practice means it's applied somewhat unevenly across Taiwan's localities. Some counties elect most of their representatives from districts with three seats or fewer; for instance, in Penghu only the Magong City district elects more than four councilors and is therefore covered by the quota. In practice, the actual share of women winning elections to councils is significantly above the 1/4 requirement: in 2014, it was over 30% across all councils, and it's risen from there to about 40% (special municipalities) and 36% (city and county councils), respectively, in 2022.

Importantly, this quota has contributed over the long term to the impressive representation of women at the highest elected offices: over 40 percent in the current legislature. Huang Chang-ling and Nathan Batto both have excellent papers on this topic.   

See also: Part 2 (The Big Six), Part 3 (North and Central), Part 4 (South, East, and Offshore Islands), and Part 5 (Summing Up).