As I was driving through Wanhua tonight, I heard a sound truck for Zhong Xiaoping 鍾小平, a KMT candidate for Taipei City Council. His message was something to the effect of, “Everyone says that I will win easily, and my poll ratings have already dropped quite a bit. Please don’t let the best candidate lose.”
In a previous post, I mentioned that Liang Wenjie 梁文傑 is claiming that he is the weakest DPP candidate in his district, so that he desperately needs your vote. Zhong is coming from the other side of the “first place curse.” In the past, lots of candidates who polls showed to be in first place have ended up very far down the list, sometimes even losing. Zhong is telling people who might be considering defecting from him not to do so.
However, this might actually be even more interesting. Zhong did not win the KMT’s telephone survey primary. In fact, he came in third. It is possible that he has since overtaken the original top two (Guo Zhaoyan郭昭嚴 and Ying Xiaowei 應曉薇), but I have my doubts. What seems possible is that Zhong is trying to paint himself as desperately needing votes, and the first place curse is a widely known script. It really doesn’t matter if he is actually in first place since there isn’t good public information on this anyway. If his message inspires some people to throw a few extra votes his way, he will have succeeded.
Tags: strategic voting
Frozen Garlic 
November 12, 2010 at 8:00 am |
Are there any political parties or groups pushing for reform of the voting system. SNTV voting is a really bad way of selecting candidates in multi-member districts. The voting system for the legislature was reformed. What about the one for city councillors?
November 12, 2010 at 9:55 am |
I haven’t heard of any push to change the electoral system for city councilors. Personally, I don’t think that SNTV is such a bad system. I certainly prefer it to the new system used for the legislature, which can produce dangerous swings in power from minor swings in public opinion.