Taiwan's 2026 Local Elections Preview (3) -- North and Central Taiwan

Keelung 基隆市

KMT: Renominated incumbent mayor Hsieh Kuo-liang (謝國樑)

DPP: Nominated Tung Tzu-wei (童子瑋) on Dec 31, 2025.

Others: TBD

T-PVI: B+6

Notes:

Incumbent Hsieh Kuo-liang easily survived a recall attempt in October 2024: no beat yes, 55-45%, and the yes votes fell about 8k votes short of the 25% threshold. The recall was supposedly organized because Mayor Hsieh had ordered police to break into a retail property whose owners were contesting an order to vacate, before a court had ruled on the dispute. Recall organizers also claimed a larger set of grievances: mismanaged spending, broken campaign promises, opaque no-bid contracts, and new busses breaking down. Hsieh has also had fairly low approval ratings for much of his first term. But apparently not low enough to be recalled...
The Keelung recall vote was a preview of the Great Recall elections of 2025, when all the KMT legislators facing recalls also won. Like in 2025, the signature-gathering drive was launched by a civil society group, and DPP figures including the former DPP mayor Lin Yu-chang (林右昌) and current Taipei mayor nominee Puma Shen joined campaigners on stage to support recalling Hsieh.
Hsieh comes from a prominent and wealthy political family in Keelung. His grandfather (謝清雲) founded the Keelung Second Credit Cooperative in the 1950s, then was a Taiwan Provincial Assembly member and ran in (but lost) the Keelung mayor's race in 1964 -- as a KMT member! -- to an independent candidate. His father Hsieh Hsiu-ping (謝修平) inherited the family business and also served as a Provincial Assembly member before becoming Keelung City Council Speaker and later serving as a National Assembly member from 1991-96. He sought the Keelung mayor's office in 1997 but was forced aside by the party center as it faced a stiff challenge from the DPP.
Hsieh Kuo-liang holds multiple degrees from U.S. universities -- a BA from USC and an MS from MIT -- and speaks excellent English. He also has an LLM from NCCU in Taipei. He eventually followed in the family footsteps and entered politics, winning an LY seat in 2004 on the PFP label, then winning reelection in 2008 and 2012 as the sole legislator from Keelung. He either chose or was forced not to run in 2016 when Hau Lung-pin (郝龍斌) wanted to parachute into what he thought was a safe blue Keelung LY seat (which Hau then lost in an embarrassing upset.) Hsieh ran the family business for a few years before making his comeback in 2022 and is the first of the Hsieh clan to actually become mayor.
Tung Tzu-wei is a two-term Keelung city councilor who was elected council speaker in 2022, when he was only 36 years old. He's also from a political family: his grandfather is Tung Yung (童永), a policy advisor to both Tsai Ing-wen and Lai Ching-te, and President Lai is his father's cousin. Tung was the top vote-getter in his multi-member council district in both 2018 and 2022, so he's got some proven electoral appeal. This is the right kind of candidate profile for the DPP to be competitive in a blue-leaning city like Keelung.

Polls:

7.24-27: A Mirror Media poll finds a close race: Hsieh leads Tung 38.5-36%. Tung leads among respondents under 50.

Rating: leans KMT. Hsieh is an incumbent running for re-election in a blue-leaning city, and that should be enough for him to win. But the recall challenge, his low public approval ratings, and a spirited DPP challenger with local roots suggest this could be competitive. This race is worth keeping an eye on for a DPP upset.

Yilan 宜蘭縣

KMT: Nominated Wu Tsung-hsien (吳宗憲) on May 4 after he won the KMT-TPP polling primary.

DPP: Nominated Lin Kuo-chang (林國漳) on October 25, 2025.

Others: TBD.

T-PVI: G+5

Notes:

Lin is a political newcomer (素人) but also a lawyer who's practiced in Yilan for 30 years, so he has deep local roots (在地深耕). He was personally recruited to run here by President Lai (in his concurrent role as DPP chairman). The DPP has suffered from factional infighting in the two previous election cycles, and that's allowed the KMT's Lin Zi-miao (林姿妙) to prevail twice in a green-leaning county. Lin's nomination here has apparently papered over these differences enough that Yilan DPP office-holders have publicly lined up behind him and he's seen as the clear favorite.
The KMT incumbent Mayor Lin was convicted of corruption charges and sentenced to 12 years imprisonment; she is now suspended and her deputy is running the county. That messed up the KMT's succession plans here: Lin's daughter, Lin Yi-ling, has declined to run as has the county council speaker Chang Sheng-te. The KMT ended up parachuting in (空降) Wu Tsung-hsien (吳宗憲), who has no previous ties to Yilan.
Wu is a former prosecutor with 20 years experience who worked in Taoyuan, Shilin, and Nantou. He joined Hou You-yi's administration in New Taipei in 2020, then in 2024 was placed high enough on the KMT legislative party list to win a seat. He's been in the LY since then.
Wu was able to dodge a bullet when the TPP-KMT joint primary poll put him on top of former TPP legislator and Yilan party chapter head Chen Wan-hui (陳琬惠). She ran a third-party campaign here in 2022, but has agreed to respect the results of the poll and back Wu. This is yet another case where the KMT has ended up a big beneficiary of their pre-electoral coalition deal with the TPP, while the TPP has nothing to show for it.

Polls:

3.16-18. My Formosa with a high-quality poll showing Lin leading Wu 36-33%, before Wu was formally nominated.

Rating: leans DPP. Lin seems to be the right kind of candidate for Yilan: deep local roots, no ties to any of the various DPP groups feuding with each other, and has the backing of the party center. Wu has a clean reputation -- a nice contrast with the last KMT mayor -- but has no local ties and no experience running for office. Absent a major national headwind, Yilan's traditional green lean should be enough for Lin to prevail over a weak opponent.

Hsinchu City 新竹市

IND: Incumbent Mayor Kao Hung-an (高虹安) is now an independent running for reelection; she was a TPP member until she was charged with embezzlement and expelled from the party.

KMT: The KMT decided in December not to field a candidate to challenge Kao.

DPP: Nominated Chuang Ching-cheng (莊競程) on April 15.

Others: Former KMT party spokesman Ho Chih-yung (何志勇) announced on Nov 11, 2025 he would run and has not backed down in the face of KMT pressure.

T-PVI: B+4

Notes:

Kao is really living a charmed political life. First she won her appeal against charges that she had embezzled funds for assistant salaries. The appeals court didn't absolve her of misbehavior but reduced her sentence to a minor violation and a fine, which reinstated her as mayor and made her eligible to run for re-election. Then she avoided a KMT challenger when the party decided to treat her like the TPP member she used to be. Now she's got the tacit support of both pan-blue parties despite being suspended as mayor for much of her first term, and running as an independent for her second.
Forgoing a challenge to Kao in Hsinchu is the single biggest concession the KMT has made to honor their pre-electoral pact with the TPP -- and it's benefitting a candidate who isn't even a TPP member anymore.
Chuang Ching-cheng is a former legislator who served one term representing Taichung's 5th District, from 2020-2024. In what's becoming a bit of a pattern for the DPP, after he lost re-election, he joined the Lai administration, then was nominated for the Hsinchu race. He is a parachute candidate without any obvious connection to Hsinchu. One reason he was nominated appears to be his educational background in biomedical engineering -- perhaps a plus given Hsinchu's highly educated electorate.
Ho's intention to run complicates things for Kao, but he's a long-shot candidate. He's a political science professor (PhD UC Santa Barbara) who previously led the KMT's party cadre training center but has never run for office before. He might pick up some protest votes, but enough to play spoiler? Probably not.

Polls:

1.19. Mirror Media poll shows Kao leading previous DPP mayor Lin Chih-chieh 41-24%.
5.19-20. CNEWS poll finds Kao leading Chuang 55-21% (and didn't ask about Ho).

Rating: leans IND. Kao has somehow stayed quite popular despite being suspended as mayor for 18 months; she's gotten a jump in support from the court reversal in December 2025. Hsinchu also has the most educated and youngest electorate in Taiwan, and Kao's former TPP affiliation and high-tech background make her a better fit here than in most of Taiwan. She's well-positioned to win in the fall, but independents are inherently vulnerable if there are both KMT and DPP candidates running, and Kao has some real political baggage. Prosecutors have also appealed the lower court ruling to the Supreme Court, and Kao could also become ineligible again if it restores the full conviction -- which would blow this race wide open.

Hsinchu County 新竹縣

KMT: Nominated Hsu Hsin-ying (徐欣瑩) on March 28.

DPP: Nominated Jhubei Mayor Cheng Chao-feng (鄭朝方) on June 10.

Others: KMT Deputy Magistrate Chen Chien-hsien (陳見賢) has threatened to run as an independent.

T-PVI: B+11

Notes:

Hsu Hsin-ying has a long history in Hsinchu County and a complicated relationship with the KMT. She left the party in 2015 when it was spiraling in the late Ma Ying-jeou era, and founded the Minkuotang (民國黨) as a kind of "protest" KMT party. She then ran as James Soong's VP candidate in 2016, and ran on the MKT label in the 2018 Hsinchu County election with the support of Ko Wen-je, losing to the current incumbent Yang Wen-ke 38-33%, with DPP nominee Cheng Chao-feng taking 28%. In 2020 she dissolved the MKT and ran as part of a Parliamentary Party Alliance that didn't win any seats. She rejoined the KMT in 2022, then was nominated and elected to the LY in Hsinchu's 1st District in 2024.
The KMT held a primary here to determine the nominee, and Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun put her finger on the scale against Hsu by making the party member vote count for 30% of the final score. That still wasn't enough; Hsu narrowly beat Cheng's preferred candidate, deputy magistrate Chen Chien-hsien (陳見賢). Chen has pointedly not endorsed Hsu and rumors are that he will launch an independent bid, which would split the pan-blue vote.
Cheng Chao-feng is the current mayor of Jhubei, the largest city in the county (37% of the total electorate) and effectively a suburb of high-tech Hsinchu. He won that office with only 40% of the vote in 2022 when KMT, TPP, and independent candidates split the rest. He's also run against Hsu before, in 2018, when both lost to Yang Wen-ke (楊文科).
Hsinchu County is majority Hakka, a demographic group with which the DPP has traditionally been quite weak. Cheng is Hakka and was recruited heavily by the party center, with President Lai personally bestowing his campaign sash on him at the nomination press conference.
The TPP is sitting this one out, and has focused their efforts instead on winning Jhubei; they've nominated Chiu Chen-yuan (邱臣遠), a former TPP legislator and Hsinchu City's deputy mayor (and acting mayor for the 18 months Kao was suspended). The KMT hasn't yielded the nomination there, though, instead putting forward county councilor Wu Hsu-chih (吳旭智). Neither side is backing down and Ko Wen-je has been unusually, publicly vocal about supporting a TPP candidate here. It's a little odd that this township-level race is where the party has decided to take a firm stand against the KMT. If the two parties do both register their own candidates, a significant part of the TPP's future hopes then will rest on Chiu's performance. FWIW, the DPP has nominated Yang-ming Chiao-tung University Professor Tseng Sheng-kai (曾聖凱) for Jhubei mayor.
The incumbent county executive Yang Wen-ke was indicted in July 2024 for accepting bribes in a real estate development in Jhubei. He was acquitted just last month, but several other county government officials were convicted. Prosecutors may appeal. Something to watch given Jhubei's political importance this cycle.

Polls:

2026.1.24-26. Taiwan Power News (?) reports poll with Hsu leading Cheng 39-34%.
2.25-27. TVBS poll (reported in news article but not on polling site) looks at three-way race: finds Chen with 35%, Cheng with 29%, Hsu in 3rd with 22%.
3.4-6. MyFormosa poll finds Hsu leading Cheng 38.5%-32%.

Rating: Leans KMT. A lot depends on whether Chen Chien-hsien follows through with his threat to run as an independent. Cheng is the strongest candidate the DPP could run here, but even so it will take a serious pan-blue split for him to pull off the upset.

Miaoli County 苗栗縣

KMT: Independent mayor Chung Tung-chin (鍾東錦) rejoined the KMT on September 14, 2025, and is running for re-election.

DPP: Nominated Chen Pin-an (陳品安) on November 26, 2025.

Others: TBD

T-PVI: B+12

Notes:

As speaker of the Miaoli County Council, Chung Tung-chin thumbed his nose at KMT party center in 2022, running as a renegade candidate when party chair Eric Chu settled instead on the obscure Hsieh Fu-hung (謝福弘) as the party's nominee. Chung was kicked out of the party but nonetheless won handily in a four-way race with 43%, although the DPP and NPP candidates combined won 45%. The party formally readmitted him in September 2025. As an incumbent KMT mayor he benefits from the party's presumption of renomination and its pact with the TPP; he's likely to have a much easier time of it this election cycle.
The DPP's Chen Pin-an got her start in politics in 2013 by defending protestors in Miaoli who'd tried to stop an onshore wind project by InfraVest, a German wind power company. She then put down roots in Miaoli: she won a county council seat in 2018 as an independent, then joined the DPP and was re-elected in 2022 with the highest vote total in her district.

Polls:

Rating: Likely KMT. With no pan-blue challengers, Chung is well-positioned to win re-election in one of the deepest blue counties in Taiwan. That said, the DPP did well here to recruit Chen, who is a fresh face and has high name recognition and a decent electoral track record in Miaoli. The DPP+NPP combined strength in 2022 is also an intriguing data point. And Chung has a sordid personal history that could again blow up at some point. We'll know more once candidate registration has passed -- another independent candidate entering the race could open a path for an upset.

Nantou County 南投縣

KMT: Renominated incumbent mayor Hsu Shu-hua (許淑華)。

DPP: Nominated Wen Shih-cheng (溫世政), a local dentist.

Others: TBD.

T-PVI: B+5

Notes:

Hsu Shu-hua has already had a long political career. She got her start in politics by being elected to the Nantou County Council as a PFP member way back in 2002, when she was only 27. She joined the KMT and won the Nantou City mayor's race in 2005, serving two terms, then won an LY by-election (for Nantou 2, the bluer of Nantou's two LY districts) in 2015 and was re-elected twice (with 57% and 55% of the vote) in tough years for the KMT. She was a KMT Central Standing Committee member and served as spokesperson for Han Kuo-yu's 2018 Kaohsiung mayoral campaign. In 2022, she won the Nantou magistrate race 56-44%, becoming Nantou's first-ever female magistrate. Moreover, her satisfaction ratings have improved significantly over her first term. As an incumbent in a blue-leading county with a long history of native-son/daughter voting patterns, she's going to be hard to beat.
That said, she does have some controversies in her recent past. During the 2022 campaign she was accused of plagiarizing her master's thesis; Feng Chia University ultimately accepted her revised thesis and let her keep the degree. In addition, her father, Hsu Tien-sung (許天送), who is a former two-term Nantou City representative council chair, is a former convict, which DPP challenger Frida Tsai Pei-hui (蔡培慧) raised as an attack line in their race in 2022; Hsu defended her father as having "already paid his debt to society." More recently, in 2024, her administration's plan to site a waste incinerator in Mingjian Township sparked organized local opposition and protester clashes during 2026 environmental review hearings.
Wen Shih-cheng is a native (prodigal?) son who has been away for a long time: he grew up in Caotun but went to high school in Taichung, went to Taipei Medical University's dentistry program, and built a successful and famous dental implant practice in New Taipei. He hasn't lived in Nantou since, or been involved in electoral politics before.
The DPP's efforts to recruit a more experienced candidate here struck out: their top choices were at-large legislator Lo Mei-ling (羅美玲 - a naturalized citizen born in Malaysia who served in the Nantou County council) and Deputy Minister of Health and Welfare Lin Ching-yi (林靜儀), who both declined.

Polls:

TBD.

Rating: Safe KMT. Of all the KMT-run localities, this one seems the hardest in which to imagine an upset. It's got a popular incumbent mayor running for re-election in a blue-leaning area, facing a complete political novice who hasn't lived in the county for decades, with no third-party challengers or intra-party splits on the horizon.

Changhua County 彰化縣

KMT: Nominated Wei Ping-cheng (魏平政) on May 13, 2026.

DPP: Nominated Chen Su-yueh (陳素月) in December 2025 via internal poll.

Others: Former DPP mayor Chiu Chien-fu (邱建富); TPP's Tsai Pi-ru (蔡壁如); KMT legislator Hsieh Yi-feng (謝衣鳯) has threatened to run as an independent.

T-PVI: B+1

Notes:

It seems like there's always at least one race that goes haywire for both major parties in each election cycle. In 2022 that was Miaoli. In 2026, it's Changhua. Both parties are dealing with disgruntled primary losers who threaten to split the vote, and there's still the threat of a renegade campaign by a TPP-linked candidate, too.
Chen Su-yueh is the sitting legislator from Changhua's 4th District, a seat she's held since winning a by-election in 2015. Before that she was a Changhua County Councilor for two terms (2006-14). Her vote totals as a legislator: 2016 - 57% (DPP Pr 57%); 2020 - 53% (DPP Pr 57%), 2024 - 52% (DPP Pr 39%).
Chiu Chien-fu is a 39-year DPP member and two-term mayor of Changhua City -- the largest in the county -- who was passed over for the nomination. He quit the party in June and announced a run as an independent.
Wei Ping-cheng is a lawyer from a well-known Shetou-area silk-stocking manufacturing family who was nominated by party chair Cheng Li-wun on May 13, 2026. He has no previous electoral experience.
The party passed over sitting Legislator Hsieh Yi-feng from Changhua's 3rd District, who had stronger polling numbers but was blocked for "family reasons," per KMT party center.
The TPP's Tsai Pi-ru declared for the race shortly after Wei was nominated, arguing that she would be the stronger candidate for the pan-blue side. But on June 3, the TPP election committee decided not to nominate a candidate in Changhua, and Tsai publicly dropped her bid but still didn't rule out a possible run.
Incumbent KMT magistrate Wang Huei-mei (王惠美) twice won easily here but is term-limited out, meaning this is another open-seat race where the KMT is playing defense. Wang has also been noticeably absent from Wei's campaign events so far.

Polls:

5.20-21. CNEWS poll looks at Chen, Wei, and Tsai; Chen in lead with 30%, Wei at 14%, Tsai at 8.5%.
8.10-17. ETToday poll finds Chen way ahead of Wei, 36-19%, with Chiu getting 12%.

Rating: Leans DPP. Changhua is as close to an evenly-balanced county as there is in Taiwan -- only one point bluer than the national average. Thanks to Wang Huei-mei's popularity, the KMT has held the county government without trouble for eight years, but they've nominated a weak candidate in Wei who doesn't appear to have the support of other local powerbrokers. Chen Su-yueh is vulnerable given the renegade DPP candidate, but Wei is going to struggle to unify the pan-blue vote behind him, as the latest polls show. If Hsieh or Tsai run that would make things even worse for the KMT. It would probably take a late switch in KMT candidate to make this competitive.