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)

Part 1 (Intro); Part 3 (North and Central); Part 4 (South, East, and Offshore Islands); Part 5 (Summing Up) 

First up: the six special municipalities (直轄市), together containing about 70 percent of Taiwan's total population. These are the big prizes and will get most of the media attention. They will also do the most to shape the narrative about who "won" this election cycle.

The current breakdown: the KMT is defending four cities: Taipei, New Taipei, Taoyuan, and Taichung. The DPP is defending two: Tainan and Kaohsiung. By population: 

For comparison, here's my preview and the results from four years ago.

T-PVI

Like last time, I've added in a rough estimate of the partisan leaning of each locality. Following the Partisan Voting Index (PVI) developed by the Cook Political Report for elections in the United States, I've called this the Taiwan Partisan Voting Index (T-PVI). To calculate T-PVI, I averaged the DPP presidential vote share in each jurisdiction over the last two presidential elections (in 2020 and 2024), then took the difference between the national and local vote share. B+1 means the city or county is one point bluer (i.e. less favorable to the DPP) than the national electorate. G+1 means it is one point greener (more favorable to the DPP.) By this measure, the "bluest" locality in Taiwan is Lienchiang County, at B+33, and the "greenest" is Tainan at G+11. Of Taiwan's 22 localities, 15 are bluer than average, and 7 are greener. So, in a national political environment where the blue and green camps are running even, the blue side should be favored to win 15 localities to the green side's 7.

Polling in Taiwan

Taiwan has lots of polling companies, but they vary widely in quality and frequency, and some of the ones that are most consistent and associated with mainstream media outlets also have strong house effects. For instance, TVBS has a large pan-blue bias (on the order of 10 points), while Liberty Times has a smaller pan-green bias. That doesn't make them useless -- a biased estimator can still be informative -- but it does mean you shouldn't take polls from one company at face value without also comparing to polls from other outlets. I'll try to post polls from all reputable houses (and some less-reputable ones when there's no other alternative) and let the data do most of the talking. 

Sites with polls of multiple races: 

• Storm Media polls page.
• TVBS Polling Center. 
• MyFormosa
• CNEWS
• Mirror Media
• Liberty Times
• 2026 Global View Local Mayors Satisfaction poll
• Era News Polling Center

Update 8.29: I'm adding in the city council party breakdowns as of August 2026. Note that the specific party counts differ in most cases from the 2022 election results because of resignations, party-switching, and the occasional by-election to fill vacancies. I will attempt to track nominations by each party and note comparisons to 2022, with a special focus on the TPP and the small parties. Abbreviations for those: 

• TPP = Taiwan People's Party
• NPP = New Power Party
• SDP = Social Democratic Party
• TSP = Taiwan Statebuilding Party 
• TSU  = Taiwan Solidarity Union
• NP = New Party
• NPSU = Non-Partisan Solidarity Union -- essentially independents who choose to caucus together for strategic reasons. 

It's too much detail for me to track all these races closely, but they are important for party-building. They illustrate just how strong the KMT-DPP duopoly is when one moves below the national level and outside of the Taipei media bubble: most councils have no third-party councilors despite the low electoral thresholds. I have also noted speaker and deputy speaker positions, and factional ties and accusations of vote-buying that often come with those positions.

Taipei - 台北市

KMT: Re-nominated Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安). 

DPP: Nominated Shen Bo-yang (Puma Shen 沈伯洋), on May 13. 

Others: TBD

T-PVI: B+3

Notes:

• Chiang Wan-an is KMT royalty. He's the ostensible grandson of Chiang Ching-kuo through his father John Chang --> Chiang (章孝嚴 --> 蔣孝嚴), who claimed to be an illegitimate child of Chiang Ching-kuo and in the 2000s changed the family name to make the link explicit. Chiang's father was a key figure in the party for decades. The younger Chiang spent significant time in the United States, earning a law degree and practicing law in the San Francisco Bay Area before eventually returning to Taiwan.
• Chiang gets mocked a lot by green partisans for a rather wooden campaign style and a reserved personality (and also for his family lineage), but he's more than just a famous name. At this point in his career he's put together a rather impressive electoral history:
• 2016: He entered electoral politics for the first time as a candidate for the legislature in this election cycle -- a very bad one for the KMT -- and won Taipei's 3rd district with 47% of the vote at the same time that Tsai Ing-wen carried it 52-38%.
• 2020: In one of the marquee races of that cycle, he fended off a stiff challenge from the DPP's Enoch Wu, winning re-election 51-45% and again running nine points ahead of the KMT presidential ticket (Han Kuo-yu won only 42% in the district).
• 2022: Chiang then won a three-way race for Taipei mayor with 42% of the vote, consolidating the KMT vote behind him while the DPP's Chen Shih-chung (32%) and the TPP's Huang Shan-shan (25%) split the rest. 
• Puma Shen is a first-term DPP party-list legislator and co-founder of DoubleThink Labs and the Kuma Academy. He's been a frequent public presence since entering the legislature. But he's never run for elected office before on his own. This nomination seems more aimed at burnishing the DPP's national and international image than actually trying to defeat Chiang.  
• The DPP had one of its critical breakthroughs in the 1990s when Chen Shui-bian won the mayor's race in Taipei in 1994, but the party hasn't come close to winning here since Chen was defeated by Ma Ying-jeou in 1998. Since then the party's candidate vote share: 36%, 41%, 44%, none (the party supported Ko Wen-je, who won 57%), 17%, 32%. Woof. 
• Chiang took on a prominent role in the KMT's rally against tainted cooking oil in late July, and he has been attacking the DPP government more forcefully in other forums in recent months. Because of his family background and the fact he's the mayor of Taipei, he is sometimes floated as a potential presidential candidate for 2028. I think he's better positioned to run in 2032; he's young enough to afford to wait, and he still is mostly untested in national politics. But I do think he is a "break glass in case of emergency" option in case the KMT can't coalesce around any other contender for 2028. That is, as long as he wins reelection. 
• Like the mayors of all six special municipalities, Chiang is relatively popular right now: a Global Views Monthly survey from May put him at about 65% approval. That's neck-and-neck with Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) of Taichung for the most popular KMT special municipality mayor. 

Polls: 

• TVBS poll from May 21-26, 2026, finds Chiang with a commanding lead over Shen, 56-30%. 

Mayor's Race Rating: likely KMT. Chiang is a popular incumbent running for re-election in a city that leans blue, although not as much as it used to -- Lai Ching-te in 2024 did only 1.6 points worse here than in New Taipei. Those partisan fundamentals suggest that with the right candidate the DPP could be competitive in Taipei. Unfortunately for them, unless it's a green wave year, that candidate would need to be far stronger than Puma Shen, who is completely untested in electoral politics and already a somewhat partisan and polarizing figure from his short time in the legislature. It's surprising the DPP couldn't come up with someone more formidable to challenge Chiang.  

Results: TBD

New Taipei - 新北市

KMT: Nominated Lee Shu-chuan (李四川) on April 29. 

DPP: Nominated Su Chiao-hui (蘇巧慧) on November 25, 2025. 

Others: TBD

T-PVI: B+1

Notes:

• Incumbent mayor and former presidential candidate Hou You-yi / Hou Yu-ih (侯友宜) is term-limited out, so this is an open-seat contest: one of 10 (!) the KMT is defending this cycle. 
• This nomination was the stiffest test of whether the KMT and TPP would actually be able to cooperate in these elections. Almost a year ago, the TPP's current party leader Huang Kuo-chang signaled he would run here and pushed to win KMT's backing for a joint nomination. I thought Huang might drive a hard bargain and demand New Taipei in exchange for the TPP supporting KMT candidates elsewhere. But in the end, the TPP agreed to a joint polling process for all the mayoral races, and in the contest for New Taipei conducted in April, Huang polled worse than Lee and meekly accepted the results. That bodes well for the KMT, and not so well for the TPP's long-term prospects. 
• Lee is a rather colorless long-time party official who has served multiple KMT mayors in a deputy role for almost a decade: first Eric Chu in New Taipei (2010-14), then Han Kuo-yu in Kaohsiung (2018-20), then Chiang Wan-an in Taipei (2022-present). In between he was Secretary-General of the Executive Yuan from 2014-15 during the late Ma era, and then Secretary-General of the KMT from 2015-16. He is a solid if rather uninspiring choice for the party. 
• The DPP has still never won New Taipei since it became a special municipality in 2010. The last DPP candidate to win here was Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) way back in 2001 when it was still Taipei County. Su also happens to be Su Chiao-hui's father. The DPP is hoping the younger Su can channel some of that family electoral magic to end their losing streak here. 
• Su has a decent electoral track record of her own. In New Taipei 5, she ran level with Tsai Ing-wen in 2016 and 2020, but 14 points ahead of Lai in 2024. Perhaps more impressive is her handle on intra-party politics: she cleared the field and obtained the DPP's nomination extremely early in the cycle, in November 2025.  
• New Taipei is Taiwan's most populous locality, with over four million people, making it the biggest electoral prize in these elections. It is also politically closely divided: it is only about a point "bluer" than the national average.  

Polls: 

• 2026.1.6-16. TVBS poll finds Lee way ahead of Su, 47-32%. 
• 2026.4.8-10. MyFormosa poll reports Lee at 35.5% support, Su at 34.5%, consistent with a very close race.  
• 2026.8.24-26. Era News poll finds Su in the lead, 38-32%. 

Mayor's Race Rating: Toss-up. Su has the advantage of having actually run in and won elections in New Taipei, while Lee has never been a candidate before. On the other hand, Lee has ably served three very different KMT mayors and will have the backing of outgoing incumbent Hou Yu-ih. Most importantly, Lee has avoided a split with the TPP over this race; Huang Kuo-chang pledged to support Lee's campaign and Lee promised to appoint TPP members to his government if he wins. New Taipei has a near-even partisan split and this is a marquee race, so national factors will likely tip the balance here.  

Results: TBD

Taoyuan - 桃園市

KMT: Renominated incumbent mayor Chang Shan-cheng (Simon Chang 張善政). 

DPP: Nominated Huang Shih-chieh (黃世杰) on April 15.

Others: TBD

T-PVI: B+4

Notes:

• Chang Shan-cheng was a surprise pick for the KMT nomination four years ago, a decision that party chairman Eric Chu took some flack for. It took Chang some time to consolidate the party behind his campaign, but in the end he won convincingly over the DPP's Cheng Yun-peng (鄭運鵬), 52-40% with a TPP candidate taking another 5%. Since then he's steered clear of national controversy. 
• Chang served in the second Ma Ying-jeou administration, as deputy premier and then premier after January 2016, when Ma was a lame duck. He was also Han Kuo-yu's running mate in the 2020 presidential election, so he's held key roles in the KMT for over a decade.  
• Huang Shih-chieh is a former legislator who served one term representing Taoyuan's 2nd District from 2020-2024. He lost re-election by only about 1200 votes (48.2-47.6%) -- one of several marginal wins for the KMT on which their current legislative plurality rests. Huang then joined the Lai administration as Deputy Minister of Justice until being nominated here.
• Huang initially entered politics when he was recruited to join DPP Taoyuan Mayor Cheng Wen-tsan's (鄭文燦) administration in 2014. Cheng was a popular two-term mayor but is now standing trial on corruption charges. It's not clear if the Cheng connection is a hindrance to Huang at this point, but it is a reminder of the real damage the DPP brand has suffered here from Cheng's corruption scandals.   

Polls: 

• Nothing reliable yet that I've seen, but unscientific polls indicate a blowout for Chang. 

Rating: Likely KMT. Like the other special municipality mayors, Chang is popular, with 62% of respondents expressing approval in the Global Views survey in May. Popular incumbent mayors are hard to knock off absent a national wave. And so far there's no sign the green camp is benefiting from a significant political tailwind.   

Results: TBD

Taichung - 台中市

KMT: Nominated Chiang Chi-chen (Johnny Chiang 江啟臣) on April 1. 

DPP: Nominated Ho Hsin-chun (何欣純) on October 22, 2025. 

Others: TBD

T-PVI: B+1

Notes:

• Chiang is the long-time legislator from Taichung's 8th District and has served as the deputy speaker of the Legislative Yuan since February 2024. He's long aspired to be Taichung mayor; he lost a close contest for the KMT nomination in 2018 to current mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) when both were young-ish legislators, and he bided his time until the position came open again. Now it has and he's long been assumed to be the heir-apparent.
• Complicating his ascent was Yang Chiung-ying (楊瓊瓔), another long-time Taichung legislator (first elected in 1998!) representing Taichung 3, who surprised some people by challenging Chiang for the party nomination. Chiang won the internal poll at the end of March; the numbers were kept confidential by mutual agreement. 
• Ho Hsin-chun is also a veteran legislator. She's represented Taichung's 7th District since 2012, and she's consistently run ahead of the DPP presidential ticket: 4 points in 2012, 7 points in 2016, 6 points in 2020, and a whopping 16 points ahead of Lai in 2024. 
• That two incumbent Taichung legislators are facing off makes this look like a pretty even fight, at least on paper. Alas, Taichung electoral politics is weird. Some time ago I was looking at correlations between legislative and presidential vote shares across recent elections, and Taichung had a bunch of outliers in both directions: both KMT and DPP legislators did better than their respective presidential tickets, including both Ho and Chiang. For some reason (probably factional politics) the personal vote here seems to be significantly more important than in the other special municipalities -- and that makes it harder to forecast the outcome without some insider-y knowledge. 

Polls: 

• The only mainstream poll I've seen for this is from TVBS way back in January 2026, before the nomination was decided; they found Chiang leading Ho 46-31%, much better than Yang's 36-34%. 
• 2026.8.11-13. Poll by Taiwan Brain Trust (新台灣國策智庫), a green-leaning polling outfit, reports Chiang leading Ho 43-36%. 

Rating: Leans KMT. That's based on not a lot more than a gut feeling right now: Taichung is a swing city, and national factors currently favor the KMT a bit in open-seat races. 

Tainan - 台南市

KMT: Nominated Hsieh Lung-chieh (謝龍介) on December 24, 2025

DPP: Nominated Chen Ting-fei (陳亭妃) after she won the polling primary on January 16. 

Others: TBD

T-PVI: G+11

Notes:

• The DPP held a polling primary here to determine their nominee. Incumbent Huang Wei-che (黃偉哲) is term-limited out, and two legislators from Tainan, Chen Ting-fei (Tainan 3) and Lin Chun-hsien (林俊賢) (Tainan 5), duked it out in the contest to replace him. Chen ultimately prevailed over Lin by only about 2 points in the head-to-head poll against Hsieh Lung-chieh. 
• The KMT had a much easier time deciding their nominee: they went back to Hsieh Lung-chieh, who won over 43% of the vote in a valiant losing effort against Huang in 2022. 
• Tainan has been run by a DPP mayor since it became a special municipality in 2010. It's the greenest locality in Taiwan; a KMT upset here would be truly monumental. But Hsieh wasn't that far away in 2022. He was helped by the fact that Huang has ranked near the bottom of Taiwan mayors for much of his time in office. Without an unpopular incumbent to run against, this race is likely not to be as close this time around. 
• There's long been rumblings of discontent in Tainan about its lack of economic development and good infrastructure; it's the only one of the six special municipalities without a mass transit rail system, and it's now also the smallest of the six, with 1.85 million people. It's also suffered significant flooding events, including a major one in June. In addition, the DPP's factional politics here are especially fractious. 

Polls: 

• The only recent poll is a web-only one from BigMedia (鉅聞天下新聞網) in March; it finds Chen with only a 5-point lead over Hsieh, 45-40%. 

Rating: Likely DPP.  Something would have to go catastrophically wrong here for the DPP to lose Tainan. That said, something almost did in 2018: Huang Wei-che won with only 38% percent, and he underperformed here again in 2022. If there's pan-green renegade candidates in the race, that could really make things interesting. 

Results: TBD

Kaohsiung - 高雄市

KMT: Nominated Ko Chih-en (柯志恩) on December 24, 2025.

DPP: Nominated Lai Jui-lung (賴瑞隆) on January 21. 

Others: TBD

T-PVI: G+7

Notes:

• Like in Tainan, there was a fierce intra-party struggle for the nomination that was settled by a polling primary. Lai won that on January 13, besting fellow legislators Chiu Yi-ying (邱議瑩), Lin Tai-hua (林岱樺), and Hsu Chih-chieh (許智傑). For primary polling geeks, this a great example of how arbitrary the results can be: Lai won the combined polls by only 0.31% over Chiu. 
• Lai is a three-term legislator first elected in Kaohsiung 9 in 2016 who then switched to Kaohsiung 8 in 2020 after redistricting. His electoral performance in Kaohsiung 8: In 2020 he ran 7 points behind Tsai Ing-wen, but in 2024 he ran 7 points ahead of Lai, winning almost exactly the same vote share. Maybe that's growth? 
• The KMT has again nominated Ko Chih-en (柯志恩), their nominee from 2022. I'll repeat here what I posted before, since nothing substantial has changed...Ko is a faculty member at Tamkang University in Tamsui, New Taipei. Her father Ko Wen-fu (柯文福) was magistrate of Pingtung County from 1973-1981, so she comes from a political family in a neighboring county. In 2016, she was ranked second on the KMT's party list, ensuring her a seat for the 2016-2020 term. In 2020 she ran for the LY in New Taipei 7, losing 46-40% to Lo Chih-cheng (羅致政), then returned to teaching. She has also headed the KMT's National Policy Foundation. She moved her household registration from New Taipei to Kaohsiung for the 2022 election. After 2024 she's an at-large legislator on the KMT party list. 
• The outgoing DPP mayor Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁) is quite popular and is sometimes floated as a potential presidential candidate -- perhaps even in 2028 if Lai falters. 

Polls: 

• 2026.1.19. ETToday puts out a poll right after the DPP primary showing Ko leading Lai 44-37%. 
• 2026.7.16-18. Era News polling center finds Lai up 36-24%. 
• 8.10. BigMedia releases a poll showing a very close race, with Lai ahead narrowly, 48-46%. 
• 8.14. An unnamed DPP party insider leaks that Lai is consistently leading Ko by about 10 points, according to their internal polls. Take that with a huge grain of salt, but it's a data point. 

Rating: Likely DPP. The KMT seems quite bullish about their chances here, and polls from various dubious sources suggest a close race. Recent history also gives them some hope: Han Kuo-yu did pull off the upset of the decade here in 2018. But Kaohsiung is also a city with a popular DPP mayor, and the DPP currently holds all eight LY seats. I expect normal partisan leanings to reassert themselves as the campaign picks up, and the KMT hasn't been competitive in a presidential election or won a legislative race anywhere in Kaohsiung since 2012 -- that's 14 years! For Ko to have a real chance, she needs a lot of DPP supporters to be demoralized and sit this one out.   

Results: TBD

Part 1 (Intro); Part 3 (North and Central); Part 4 (South, East, and Offshore Islands); Part 5 (Summing Up)