Immediate reactions

Sometimes it is easy to forget how stable Taiwan’s party politics are.  This election result reflects that underlying stability.  It is hard to move the national vote more than a few percentage points.

I previously wrote that even if Ma Ying-jeou won, it would be an ugly win.  I was wrong.  His 6% win seems like a substantial win, especially when you consider that the blue-green balance is 54-46.  This is a little smaller than the 58-42 balance of four years ago, but 54-46 is still a substantial gap, especially since the KMT did not have the advantage of running against an unpopular and discredited incumbent.  With a sizeable 70-43 majority in the legislature, Ma Ying-jeou is not going to immediately become a lame duck president.  Instead, he probably has enough power to do most of what he wants.  He will almost certainly have the power to implement the next stage of ECFA, and it is not out of the question that he could push through the peace agreement that he mentioned during the campaign.

 

Because the blue camp vote was split between Ma and Soong, I am going to look primarily at the green camp vote.  Four years ago, Frank Hsieh got 41.6% of the vote.  This year, Tsai Ing-wen got 45.6%.  The interesting thing is that the DPP’s vote grew just about 4% everywhere, regardless of how much they had four years ago.  The only major exception is Taipei City, which has always been the most stable place in Taiwan.  The increase is slightly higher in Tsai’s childhood home of Pingtung and in the northern Hakka areas (Taoyuan, Hsinchu County, and Miaoli), but the difference is not too great.  The DPP even increased by nearly 4% in Jinmen and Lianjiang which is particularly startling since this meant that they nearly doubled their previous levels of support.  I’m not sure what this nearly uniform increase means, but it certainly is interesting.

 

	2008	2012	improvement
Taipei City	0.370	0.395	0.026
New Taipei	0.389	0.435	0.045
Ilan	0.486	0.525	0.039
Taoyuan	0.354	0.399	0.045
Hsinchu Cnty	0.260	0.309	0.050
Miaoli	0.290	0.332	0.042
Taichung	0.400	0.447	0.047
Changhua	0.424	0.465	0.041
Nantou	0.380	0.424	0.044
Yunlin	0.515	0.558	0.043
Chiayi Cnty	0.544	0.586	0.041
Tainan	0.533	0.577	0.044
Kaohsiung	0.497	0.534	0.037
Pingtung	0.503	0.551	0.049
Taitung	0.267	0.305	0.038
Hualien	0.225	0.259	0.034
Penghu	0.421	0.457	0.036
Jilong	0.323	0.367	0.044
Hsinchu City	0.353	0.395	0.042
Chiayi City	0.476	0.510	0.034
Jinmen	0.049	0.082	0.033
Lianjiang	0.048	0.080	0.032

 

 

I had thought that Tsai Ing-wen would run a bit ahead of her party, but this turned out not to be the case.  If you take the party list votes and break them into their traditional blue and green components (KMT, PFP, and NP are blue; DPP and TSU are green), the balance is 51.5-43.6, or a 7.9% lead for the blue camp.  That is only slightly smaller than the gap in the presidential election.  The other parties collectively took about 4.9% of the party list vote.  If you really want to apportion their votes to the blue or green camps, I would put the People Party (人民最大黨) and the Green Party in the green camp.  The former advocated a pardon for former President Chen, and the latter had a strategic alliance with the DPP in one Taipei district.  I’d put all the others in the blue camp.  That produces a blue-green balance of 54.0-46.0%.  At first glance, it doesn’t look like Tsai Ing-wen was able to take any votes from the other side of the political divide.  This presidential election ran along familiar partisan lines.

 

 

Turning to the 73 single-member districts, the KMT won these by a 46-27 margin.  (I am counting the two independents as KMT candidates.)  I don’t know the breakdown of party votes for these constituencies yet, but I imagine it is fairly close to the presidential and party list results.  This has turned a small blue camp advantage in votes into a sizeable advantage in seats.

Four years ago, it was assumed that the new electoral system had given the KMT an almost automatic majority in the legislature, and this election seems to confirm that idea.  Even though the election was fairly close, the KMT has easily won a majority.  However, I would argue that the DPP came as close to winning a majority in the legislature as it did to winning the presidential election.

Let’s do a small thought experiment.  Suppose that the DPP had one 1% more of the national vote.  Assume that the actual results already contain all the malapportionment and personal votes, so we simply add 1% to the DPP candidates’ votes and subtract 1% from the KMT candidates’.  If you do this, the DPP wins 5 additional seats, and the overall result is a 41-32 balance.  If we assume that the DPP won 2% more (which was roughly my pre-election guess), add 2 more seats for a 39-34 balance.  If the swing is 3% (putting Tsai and Ma in a dead tie), 4 more seats switch and the green camp wins the SMD seats by 35-38.  In this scenario, the KMT’s advantage in aboriginal seats would still give the blue camp a slight overall edge in the legislature, but let’s remember that in this scenario, the green camp’s overall vote is still slightly below 50% (at 48.6%), so it isn’t unreasonable that their legislative seats are also slightly below 50%.  If you assume the swing is 4% (putting the green camp at nearly 50% of the national vote, the SMD seats go 32-41 for the green camp.  This would be a large enough margin to give them a majority even after the KMT wins all the aboriginal seats.  In sum, the DPP had to win just about the same number of votes to win the legislature as it did the presidency.  It fell short on both counts.

 

Third party candidates did not hurt the KMT in this election.  There were nine races that the DPP could have stolen because the KMT’s vote was split by a third party candidate.  The KMT only had one opportunity.  However, the DPP only succeeded in one of its nine opportunities (Taitung), while the KMT succeeded in its only opportunity (Kaohsiung 9).

In five of the eight missed opportunities for the DPP, I am surprised by the DPP’s failure to win.  In these cases, if you had told me how much the third party candidate won, I would have confidently predicted a DPP victory.  Instead, very weak performances by these five DPP candidates allowed the KMT to hold these five seats.

 

district	KMT	DPP	3rd	notes
Taipei 4	48	34	17	missed chance
New Taipei 7	44	43	13	Missed chance
New Taipei 8	48	40	11	Improbable
New Taipei 9	49	28	23	Improbable
New Taipei 12	42	36	21	Missed chance
Taoyuan 5	45	35	19	Improbable
Taichung 8	45	39	16	Missed chance
Changhua 1	35.2	35.0	28	Missed chance
Kaohsiung 9	38	32	27	Steal
Taitung	30	42	28	Steal

 

I had thought that with the focus so heavily on the presidential elections, the outcomes in the legislative races would be pulled closer to those in the presidential election.  This doesn’t seem to have happened.  At first glance, personal votes are still quite important.  In fact, with the closer national balance, it looks like personal votes were decisive in a number of elections.

 

Turnout was lower than expected at 74.3%.  Most people had expected something in the range of 78-80%.  At first glance, it looks like the KMT mobilized their best areas better than the DPP.  Turnout is a bit higher in Taipei and New Taipei Cities and a bit lower in Yunlin and Chiayi Counties.  This might simply be an urban/rural divide, but I’d bet that turnout worked slightly in the KMT’s favor overall.  I don’t think that this was sufficient to swing the overall outcome, but that is unknowable.

 

Finally, as the results of the presidential race slowly solidified, it occurred to me that I have seen this result before with a very similar cast of characters.

	1998 Taipei Mayor	%	2012 President	%
KMT	Ma Ying-jeou	51.1	Ma Ying-jeou	51.6
DPP	Chen Shui-bian	45.9	Tsai Ing-wen	45.6
New/PFP	Wang Chian-hsuan	3.0	James Soong	2.8

How is that for similarity in what will probably be the first and last elections of Ma Ying-jeou’s career!