Yang Qiuxing 楊秋興 is continuing his transformation. He apologized for his former ideology (whatever that was). He now supports ECFA, and some in the government are suggesting that he should be one of their primary spokesmen for it. He also said that he now sees President Ma in a new light. Since deciding to run, many of his former allies have accused him of “not loving Taiwan” (because he is splitting from the DPP and indirectly helping the KMT). Now he understands what it feels like to have that label pinned on him.
Apparently this transformation is working better than I anticipated. A recent TVBS poll (Aug 10) shows his overall support holding steady (though still far behind Chen). However the most interesting thing about that poll is that they also asked which city council candidate the respondent planned to vote for. Among people supporting Yang, 32% planned to vote for a KMT city council candidate, and only 18% planned to vote DPP (the others were uncommitted). I don’t have data on this from before (TVBS asked but didn’t report the crosstabs), but I can’t imagine that Yang’s previous supporters looked like this. I hope TVBS continues to ask this kind of question; it will be interesting to see how things develop.
Tags: Yang Qiuxing
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