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From 2022: DPP legislator Tsai Shih-ying ultimately lost the Keelung mayor's race, despite the cute dog.
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.
Credit: NOWNews
(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:
- DPP: 41.2% like, 44.5% dislike. Net -3.3 points
- KMT: 27.2% like, 53.7% dislike. Net -26.5 points
- 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.
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The Speaker's Podium, ready for the next battle.
- It has not sought to obtain offices (LY speaker or deputy speaker, or cabinet positions) for its members.
- It has not sought concrete policy concessions from either the DPP or KMT in return for its support.
- It has not tried to maximize its appeal to the general electorate, and it has behaved like a pan-blue party rather than a centrist one.
This behavior is puzzling!
What Is the TPP Doing?
I have argued that the TPP is trying to bring about a partisan realignment within the pan-blue camp, away from the KMT. This is the only goal for which the TPP’s current strategy appears rational. It's an unusual strategy, but one that makes some sense given the political constraints the party faces.
Taiwan’s electoral institutions and party system present a high barrier to third-party growth. There is high party system institutionalization and politics and voting are now quite nationalized. The electoral system is permissive enough to allow small parties to gain a foothold in city councils and in the party list vote for the legislature, but they can never expand beyond small-party status unless they replace one of the Big Two. And no small party has ever succeeded in doing so in 30+ years of democratic elections.
So, to try to replace the KMT, the TPP needs to do two contradictory things at the same time.
- Convince pan-blue voters they are one of them, and in particular, to appeal to older KMT supporters while holding onto their younger base.
- Undermine the KMT, to change beliefs about the long-term viability of that party and convince their supporters that the TPP, not the KMT, is the future.
Now, if you were leading the TPP, how might you go about this? Toward the first goal, you'd pursue a public strategy of alignment with the KMT, especially on issues that you think make the DPP look bad. And toward the second, you'd quietly block legislation that would strengthen the KMT's grassroots or increase its popularity.
Evidence for the first part of this strategy is obvious: Huang Kuo-chang is appearing in public regularly with the KMT, the TPP is publicly opposing the recall elections against KMT legislators, and (almost) everything controversial that has made it to a final vote in the LY has passed with joint KMT-TPP support over DPP objections.
But what about the second? Can we find evidence of divergence of interests between the two party caucuses? This is harder to spot, because the TPP doesn't want KMT supporters to notice that it is trying to undermine the party's prospects. The TPP would rather be characterized as "marching in lockstep" with the KMT in its opposition to the DPP government, and everything else that matters to the KMT.
But I don't think this is actually true.
Is the TPP Really Supporting Everything the KMT Wants in the LY?
Clearly, the engines and cockpit need to be reinforced.
Now, what does the patterns of bomber survival in WWII have to do with the Taiwanese legislature? Well, there is also a selection process that occurs before bills introduced in the legislature come up for a vote. And we haven't paid adequate attention (and I include myself in this "we") to how that process might be skewing what we actually see being debated publicly, and being passed, by the TPP-KMT coalition over DPP objections. We need to consider the possibility that stuff the two pan-blue parties don't agree on never makes it to a vote. And it's possible this is happening a lot.
The inference problem here is that we don't know what bills the TPP quietly blocked, because the vast majority of bills introduced in the LY don't come up for a vote. Moreover, as I noted above, the TPP doesn't generally want people to know when they disagree with the KMT on a bill. (And an important corollary: the KMT also doesn't want people to know that it is not all-powerful in the legislature. So it, too, has an incentive to play down disagreements.) But now that we have about 18 months of legislative actions to observe, there is a growing list of oddities in legislation that has passed, and just as importantly, not passed, during this term, and I think we have enough observations to discern a pattern here: the KMT is not getting blanket support from the TPP.
For one, here are a few changes the DPP pushed through from 2016-2023 that hit KMT interests directly, and that the KMT screamed bloody murder about at the time, that have not so far been reversed. If the TPP is doing everything the KMT wants, I would expect to see reversals on some of these issues (I'll keep updating here as I come across more):
- Farmer's and Fisherman's and Irrigation Associations changed from elected to appointed leadership.
- Pension reforms, which reduced the preferential benefits enjoyed by martial-law-era civil servants (mostly KMT supporters).
- Actions by the Ill-Gotten Party Assets Committee to freeze or confiscate KMT party assets.
- [Update 2025.8.4] The Anti-Infiltration Act. Notably, the NPP under Huang Kuo-chang and Ko Wen-je separately supported passage of this act in 2019, while the KMT has been a consistent critic of it.
And here are a few controversial bills that the KMT caucus seemed to be gung-ho about that then quietly died, or ended up looking much different when they finally passed:
- Fu Kun-chi's special infrastructure budget bill. This would have allocated at least US$60bn to build two expressways and high speed rail to Hualien -- Fu Kun-chi's constituency. (to put that in context, Taiwan's annual defense budget is less than US$20 billion.) Speaker Han Kuo-yu and Deputy Speaker Johnny Chiang co-sponsored the two most controversial bills in that package. And then...crickets. Nothing ever came of this proposal. We don't know whether this was due to internal opposition from other members of the KMT or quiet TPP opposition, but it's an interesting data point.
- Constitutional Court reform. Lots of changes to the court were proposed after the CC ruled against the LY oversight bill, most of them designed to limit the court's authority over the LY or paralyze it completely. But the final legislation ended up at the last moment with a different threshold of nine justices required to rule legislation unconstitutional, rather than a return to the two-thirds requirement before 2022.
- Central-local government revenue division bill. I'm less confident about this one, but there were some more extreme proposals put forward in the debate about changing the formula for allocation of government revenues between central and local governments. What ended up in the bill was a 60-40 percent allocation, not as extreme as some of what was reported at the time. Here's what the TPP had originally proposed.
Why Didn't the KMT Raise the Recall Threshold?!
And finally, the real smoking gun -- the bill that clued me in to this whole shadow game between the TPP and KMT -- is the amendment to the Civil Servants Elections and Recall Act that passed in December 2024. Various KMT members floated proposals to raise the recall threshold as early as June 2024, to protect them from the prospect of mass recalls that they are, in fact, now facing down in less than a week. Isn't it strange that the KMT saw this threat coming a year ahead of time, and still failed to protect its own legislators?
I had long assumed this increase in the recall threshold was inevitable and that the activists preparing to collect recall signatures were wasting their time, because it was not in the KMT's interest to leave their legislators vulnerable to a potent recall movement that was clearly a threat even last summer. They simply couldn't not change this threshold if they had the votes -- it would be political malpractice not to. And in December, when the bill amending the Elections and Recall Act looked like it was headed for passage, the reporting on the proposal implied that the threshold would be raised. I thought so too.
Except it wasn't!
Why not? Well, way back in July 2024 Ko Wen-je was asked about this proposal, and he said he didn't support changing the threshold. The KMT tried, probably repeatedly over many months, to get the TPP to vote for this, and...failed. They didn't have the votes. Which is why the KMT is now facing mass recalls that could strip them of their control of the LY as soon as July 28.
This seems like it should be a huge part of the recall elections story, no? The KMT's coalition partner left them exposed to a mass recall. And while the KMT now has to engage in a desperate rear-guard struggle to preserve their seats, the TPP doesn't have to do anything because their legislators are all from the party list tier. (As an aside, if I were one of the KMT legislators facing a recall vote, I'd be pissed right now. The TPP hung them out to dry on this issue.)
And as for why the TPP might want to block raising the recall threshold, but not call attention to themselves as the reason? I will leave that question as an exercise for the reader...
Whither the TPP?
Will they succeed? I don’t think so. They're missing a couple elements to pull this strategy off.
First is talent. Right now the TPP has three names anyone has heard of: Ko Wen-je, Huang Kuo-chang, and Huang Shan-shan. Being generous, we might say Tsai Pi-ru and Kao Hung-an also have some name recognition. Beyond that? It’s a stretch. And Huang Kuo-chang is certainly not doing anything to share the spotlight with up-and-coming younger leaders.
Second is grassroots supporters. That means more than simply an online army of fans who turn into your livestreams and like your posts on TikTok. What the DPP and KMT still have is grassroots party activists who can be mobilized to come out to rallies, to turn out to vote, and to, yes, collect signatures for recall elections. I haven't seen a whole lot of evidence the TPP has core supporters they can rely on to turn out around the island -- in Taipei, maybe, and perhaps Hsinchu, but elsewhere they are extremely weak at local levels.
Contrast that with the DPP and, more importantly for present purposes, the KMT. I still remember clearly watching a KMT parade and rally in Taipei in January 2016, shortly before the presidential election that year. This was one of the most difficult periods in the KMT's recent history. It was the end of the Ma Ying-jeou presidency, and President Ma was deeply unpopular. The Sunflower Movement had succeeded in blocking Ma's signature cross-Strait trade agreement, the CSSTA, and the opposition stirred up by that project contributed to the KMT's sweeping defeat in the local elections in late 2014. The party then lurched from one political crisis to another over the next year. They ended up with the deep-blue firebrand Hung Hsiu-chu as their presidential candidate when everyone else declined to run, and then had to execute a late switch of candidate from Hung to party chairman Eric Chu in fall of 2015. The party's old nemesis James Soong then declared he would run (again!) as an independent candidate to give pan-blue voters a protest vote option. And at that point, everyone knew that Eric Chu was toast.
And yet, on January 8, 2016, tens of thousands of KMT supporters nevertheless showed up in Taipei from all over Taiwan for an old-fashioned political parade down Roosevelt Road to Ketagalan Boulevard, to support a hopeless campaign heading for a crushing electoral defeat. Here’s a few pictures of that.
I have always doubted Ko Wen-je is the right person for this kind of party-building work. Ko often has analogized party-building to running a business: cold, calculating, rational, and vote (profit?)-driven. That may be true for winning over swing voters. But if the only reason voters have to support you is that you're more "rational" than the next guy, what happens when they no longer believe that? What if there's another guy who comes along who offers better answers to their problems? The fans you've acquired, if they like you only because you "do the right thing," are going to abandon you when they no longer believe you have their best interests at heart. Success is easy come, easy go in this model.
There is, however, a different model of party-building in Taiwan, one that the DPP followed in its early days, which is based on identity appeals. "Our party stands for you. Our people are like you. We have suffered the same things you have. We speak the same language you have. You can trust us." Those appeals may turn some voters off...But for the DPP they also built a loyal following that has stuck with them through bad times as well as good. I just don't see the TPP doing the hard work of building those grassroots connections that can outlast any particular leader, either under Ko Wen-je or now, under Huang Kuo-chang.
Does the TPP Have a Future?: What To Look For
Putting this series of posts together has also clarified for me that the 2026 local elections are really critical for the TPP's future. Given Ko’s detention, Kao Hung-an’s suspension, and the party’s slump in the polls over the last year, they desperately need to demonstrate that they still have room to grow their electoral support. They need to develop a deeper bench of local talent – candidates who can win votes independently of the TPP’s brand and have crossover appeal. They need to run their own candidates – and win! – in some of the local mayor’s races. And they need to expand the number of seats they hold in the local councils (they won 14 last time – significant for a third party in Taiwan, but also only 1.5% of all seats.)
But the most fundamental question for the TPP in 2026 is whether to coordinate future nominations with the KMT. In 2023, Ko Wen-je rather naively assumed he could come to some kind of agreement with Eric Chu and Hou You-yi that would give him a clear path to the top of a joint presidential ticket. The spectacular way in which that agreement fell apart is a cautionary tale for the TPP. But for the party to have a chance of winning any of these offices in 2026, they still need to get the KMT to yield some nominations to TPP candidates. So the party is caught on the horns of a dilemma: cooperate and get absorbed, or don’t cooperate and throw elections to the DPP, or worse -- watch the KMT win these elections anyway and demonstrate the TPP is irrelevant. I’m not sure how they will resolve this dilemma. I’m more confident in predicting that the KMT will drive a hard bargain in any nomination negotiations, despite the TPP-KMT track record of cooperation in the LY right now, than I am in predicting the TPP's strategy in 2026.
So to wrap up, I’ll stick my neck out here and say flat out that I don’t think the TPP is going to succeed in initiating a partisan realignment away from the KMT, however they choose to approach 2026 (and 2028, for that matter). The party is much more likely to decline or collapse after the next election than to surge into second place and usher in a lasting change to Taiwan’s party system.
But it is going to be fascinating to watch them try.
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TPP legislators call for public streaming of court activities / Taipei Times
I think I understand now. The TPP is all-in on votes, not offices or policy, but they are pursuing votes in an unusual way: rather than try to pull equally from both blue and green camps, which is what most observers thought they were doing in the run-up to 2024, they are now prioritizing pan-blue votes. The reason is that they are trying to take over the KMT's space in the political spectrum through a fundamental realignment of the pan-blue camp.
So, rather than be a swing bloc in the legislature jumping between the camps issue by issue, they have instead decided for the moment to mimic the KMT. Even though most of their members are not ideologically aligned with the KMT--especially on the China issue--they nevertheless need to sound and act like a pan-blue party because they want deep blue voters to consider voting for their candidates in the future.
To see both the rationale for this kind of strategy in Taiwan, and why the party's recent behavior and rhetoric makes sense if replacing the KMT is their ultimate goal, we first need to understand the political context in which they are operating.
Third Parties In Taiwan Face Distinct Disadvantages
1. It has high party system institutionalization. Taiwan is unusual among young democracies in having a well-institutionalized party system. Party system institutionalization, or PSI, is the extent to which a party system is stable, predictable, and characterized by established patterns of interaction between political parties. We can measure PSI by looking at electoral volatility across elections, at the level of partisanship in the electorate, and the degree of coherence and organization of the individual political parties. On all these measures, Taiwan looks more like a mature democracy than a young Third Wave one -- it has relatively low electoral volatility, high partisanship, and well-organized and hierarchical political parties that compete with one another almost everywhere.
2. It tends toward two-partism. Taiwan's effective number of parties (ENPs) in the legislature this term is 2.38. Since the new electoral system was used for the first time in 2008, this number has never exceeded 2.5: it was 2.44 in 2020; 2.17 in 2016, 2.23 in 2012, and 1.75 in 2008. The same two parties that finished 1-2 in 1992, the KMT and DPP, finished 2-1 in 2024, and they have been the top two vote and seat-winners in every legislative election in between. They also are almost always the top two finishers in mayoral races around the island. There are not many other Third Wave democracies that have had such a consistent pattern of two-party competition, and even among older democracies, the persistence of the same two parties winning in every election for 30 years is quite unusual.
3. Voting patterns are highly nationalized. Party system nationalization refers to how consistent voting patterns are across a country. It has two components: static nationalization, or how much party vote shares vary across different localities or regions, and dynamic nationalization, or how much vote swings between the parties vary across these same jurisdictions. On the first, static, nationalization measure, although the two major parties have regional strongholds -- the DPP in the south, the KMT in the rural north, east coast, and offshore islands -- they both compete everywhere. There is no regionally-based party akin to the Parti Quebecois in Canada, or the Scottish National Party in the UK, or DMK, Shiv Sena, or Trinamool Congress Party (among many) in India. Nor do Taiwan's regional party strongholds look anywhere near as extreme as South Korea's, where the liberal camp routinely wins 80+% of the vote in the southwest (Jeolla), and the conservative camp wins 80+% in the southeast (Gyeongsang). And on the second, dynamic, nationalization measure, the swing between the DPP and KMT in each election has been remarkably consistent across the island. For instance, in the 2016 election, Tsai Ing-wen improved her vote share over her 2012 campaign in every single jurisdiction in Taiwan, and that increase varied only from about 5% in Penghu to about 12% in Taipei.
Why does Taiwan's party system look this way? Three reasons. First, Taiwan's unusual pattern of bottom up democratization, starting with electoral competition at the local level and gradually culminating in direct election of the LY and the president, plus the survival of the formerly authoritarian KMT into the democratic era, led to the emergence of two big parties with strong grassroots chapters, a hierarchical structure, and similar party organizations. For the last 30 years, KMT and DPP candidates have run against each other almost everywhere in Taiwan, and they also dominate the majoritarian elections for the president, legislature, and city and county executives.
Second, the China question is by far the most salient issue in Taiwan politics and the only one on which all major political parties take distinct positions. The DPP and KMT are distinguished mostly by their different approaches to managing relations with the PRC; on most other policy issues, the Big Two are as divided internally as they are with each other.
Third, and most important for present purposes, are Taiwan's electoral institutions. The LY is about 65% elected from single-member districts (SMDs) under plurality rule; about 30% from a proportional representation closed-list tier elected via a second party list ballot with a 5% threshold; and about 5% from two reserved indigenous multi-member districts (MMDs) using single-non-transferable vote (SNTV), each with three seats (M=3). The president is directly elected under plurality rule with no runoff, as are all local chief executives. And local councils are still elected using SNTV in relatively high-magnitude MMDs (typically M≥5).
The consequences of this institutional setup are twofold. First, it is relatively easy for small parties to win a few seats in the legislature through the PR tier, and in local councils because of the high district magnitudes (meaning a lower share of the vote is needed to win a seat). The electoral systems for assemblies at both levels are permissive enough to allow the most successful third parties to survive for a while, and they can even occasionally end up in a kingmaker role controlling the balance of power, as the TPP has managed to do in the current legislature. But third parties face a much more daunting challenge if they want to become more than just small niche parties: they also have to win some of the SMD plurality races outright and not simply play a spoiler role in these elections. And to date, no third party in Taiwan has managed to succeed at this challenge.
Two Strategies for Third Party Growth in Taiwan
Most new parties in Taiwan have responded to this electoral context by adopting one of two strategies. Some of them have chosen to play down or ignore the China question altogether and campaign solely on a second-dimension issue: labor rights, environmental protection, religion, LGBTQ issues, indigenous rights, health care and social welfare, and so on.
A good example of this type of party is the Green Party Taiwan, whose history is detailed in Dafydd Fell's new book. The GPT was founded in the 1990s, and although it has stuck around much longer than most other third parties from that era, it has never succeeded in winning more than a single LY seat over that time period. And yet the Green Party Taiwan is actually one of the most successful examples of parties choosing this path, which is littered with electoral failures. There are hundreds of second-dimension parties that ran on an issue orthogonal to the China question and did not attract sufficient attention or votes to break through in races for the legislature or for local councils. Today, most of them are long gone and forgotten.
The other strategy has been to take a more extreme position than the Big Two on the China question. This path has been more successful, and it is the one that the small parties people have actually heard of have used. For instance, to the pro-independence side of the DPP are the Taiwan Independence Party 建國黨, the Taiwan Solidarity Union 台聯, the New Power Party 時代力量, and the Taiwan State-Building Party 台灣基進黨; to the more pro-unification side of the KMT are the New Party 新黨, the People First Party 親民黨, and the China Unification Promotion Party 中國統一促進黨. (These are what Dafydd Fell, following Paul Lucardie, calls "purifier" parties).
Some of these parties have also leaned into a second-dimension issue on which one of the big parties is divided; for instance, the TSU was more protectionist and socially conservative than the DPP, and as Lev Nachman's new book details, the NPP was more socially liberal and pro-environment. Going further back in Taiwan, in the 1990s the New Party was pro-democratic reform and anti-corruption and sometimes teamed up with the DPP against the KMT on these issues, even though the two held polar opposite positions on the China question.
The Small Party "Valley of Death" in Taiwan Politics
The problem for parties following the second path has been how to grow beyond the extremist fringe. When small parties have attempted to expand beyond the relative safety of MMDs to compete in SMDs, time and time again they have fallen into the "valley of death" (to borrow a term from the venture capital world): they cannot ever break through in enough single member district races to convince voters they are on track to replacing one of the Big Two, and they instead lose support and fade away.
This pattern of failure occurs for two reasons. First, the Big Two don't just stand idly by. When third parties that are more extreme on the China issue run candidates in SMDs, they pose a more serious threat to the big party in their camp than simply competing in the PR list or local council races. Sometimes this party responds by offering a pre-electoral coalition, as the DPP did with the NPP in 2016, and the KMT did with the PFP in 2008; in both of these cases, the small party later got mostly absorbed into the larger party. Other times the big party goes on the offensive and attempts to knock out the smaller challenger, rallying its voters against the small party by portraying it as a traitor to the cause, as the DPP did with the Taiwan Independence Party in the late 1990s. But either way, the small party runs up against an insurmountable wall: they cannot win in the single member districts without attracting votes from some of the big party's supporters, and the big party has both the incentives and the means to prevent defections like this in most cases.
Second, small parties are consistently disadvantaged by strategic voting. In Taiwan, the China factor is so important to so many voters that the incentives for strategic voting are quite strong in the SMD races: for the president and legislature for sure, and even occasionally in the local city and county executives. Voters don't want to waste their votes on a third-party candidate if it will throw the election to the big party they hate, so third party candidates have to convince people they are running not just to play spoiler but to actually win a three-way race against both of the Big Two. And breaking through in these single-member district elections is hard: there's a discontinuity between being perceived as the likely 2nd-place party and being in 3rd or lower. (The jargon-y political science term for this pattern is the M+1 rule: in any district of magnitude M, there will be at most M+1 viable candidates because most voters will ignore or abandon the rest).
Put differently, although Taiwan's electoral institutions consistently provide some space for small parties to compete and win a few seats here and there, they do not provide room for more than two big parties -- at least as long as the party system remains highly institutionalized and voting patterns are nationalized. That means that if you lead a small party and hope to stick around in politics for the long term, you have only two choices: (1) join one of the big parties, or (2) replace one with your own.
The TPP Is Trying Something Different
TPP chairman Huang Kuo-chang and KMT chairman Eric Chu at the self-styled "Bring Democracy Back to Taiwan" summit on April 22, 2025.
By historical standards, this strategy worked. In the 2024 elections the party garnered over 20% of the party list vote, eight seats in the LY, and a kingmaker position in the LY for four years. No other party since 2008 has pulled that off. It's an impressive achievement!
And yet, it's not enough. All of the LY seats the TPP holds are via the party list; it didn't win a single district race. For a third-party candidate, Ko Wen-je did remarkably well in the presidential election -- but he still came in third. And now that he is detained indefinitely while he faces corruption charges, the TPP cannot count on Ko to win votes for them in the future and has to find some other way to appeal to the electorate. The party also no longer holds any local executive offices -- in 2022, Ko's preferred successor in Taipei, Huang Shan-shan, came in third behind the KMT's Chiang Wan-an and the DPP's Chen Shih-chung, and the party's one success story that year, Kao Hung-an's upset victory in the mayor's race in Hsinchu City, has effectively been reversed by Kao's subsequent suspension for padding her salary through reimbursements to non-existent staff while she was a legislator; she is likely to be recalled as mayor later this month.
So, despite holding a prime position in the LY right now, the TPP is also facing existential challenges. Can it reinvent itself as something more than the Ko-P party, now that Ko Wen-je is indefinitely sidelined? And if it wants not only to survive but also to thrive, it needs to find a way to displace one of the Big Two in some of the SMD seats. And what's the best strategy for that? Does it remain a free agent, swinging between green and blue depending on the issue, and get squeezed out in the next election (a la James Soong and the PFP)? Does it enter a pre-electoral coalition with one or the other, at the risk of absorption (like the NPP in 2016)? Or is there a third option?
I think they've decided on a more ambitious strategy: replacing the KMT.
For more on that strategy, see Part 3.