DPP all-stars

Which DPP candidates did well, and which were terrible?  We could judge this by who won and who lost, but that overlooks the very important factor that it is a lot easier to win in a place like Tainan than it is in a place like Hsinchu County.  So instead of looking at winning and losing, I’m going to compare each candidate’s performance to a party baseline.  I’m using the presidential vote as a baseline, mostly for convenience.  The CEC still hasn’t released the downloadable precinct level election data [I think they are waiting to finish all the recounts], so this is the fastest way to put together a small data set.

This is still very quick and dirty.  Many districts cross township borders, and I don’t have time to figure out the exact presidential votes in these districts.  Instead, I am just putting the entire township total into one district or another.  For example, Shilin 士林 District is split between Taipei 1 and Taipei 2.  Most of it is in Taipei 2, but the Tienmu 天母 area is in Taipei 1.  I put the entire Shilin District into District 2.  Since the Tienmu area leans heavily to the DPP, this has the effect of making District 1 look greener than it really is and making District 2 look bluer than it really is.  So this is not perfect, but this is the best I can do right now.

 

Let’s look at the All-Stars.  Here are the candidates who beat Tsai Ing-wen by at least 4%.  Districts with asterisks are ones that might not be so accurate.

 

District	Name	Tsai	LY%	+	Win?
Taitung*	Liu Chao-hao	0.305	0.416	0.111	Y
Pingtung 3	Pan Men-an	0.569	0.666	0.097	Y
Taichung 1	Tsai Chi-chang	0.467	0.545	0.079	Y
Penghu	Yang Yao	0.457	0.534	0.078	Y
New Taipei 2*	Lin Shu-fen	0.511	0.587	0.077	Y
Taichung 6	Lin Chia-lung	0.452	0.518	0.065	Y
Kaohsiung 4	Lin Tai-hua	0.586	0.648	0.062	Y
Hsinchu Cnty	Perng Shaw-jiin	0.309	0.370	0.061
Taichung 4	Chang Liao Wan-chien	0.407	0.463	0.056
Yunlin 2	Liu Chien-kuo	0.555	0.610	0.055	Y
Tainan 3	Chen Ting-fei	0.562	0.617	0.055	Y
Tainan 2	Huang Wei-cher	0.629	0.681	0.052	Y
Taoyuan 2	Kuo Jung-chung	0.446	0.498	0.052
Taoyuan 3*	Huang Jen-shu	0.351	0.399	0.048
Taichung 7	Ho Hsin-chun	0.460	0.503	0.043	Y
Changhua 4	Wei Ming-ku	0.463	0.502	0.040	Y

 

Liu Chao-hao 劉櫂豪 tops the list, but a third of Taitung’s population is Aborigines who vote in the presidential election but not in the district legislative election.  Aborigines vote overwhelmingly for the KMT, so Liu benefitted tremendously by not having them in his district.  Liu probably ran ahead of Tsai, but not by much.  I don’t think he belongs on this list.  He owes his victory to a split KMT vote, not to a spectacular personal vote.

Pan Men-an 潘孟安 in Pingtung 3 is in second place.  His district also has quite a few aborigines, but they are a significantly smaller percentage of the population than in Taitung.  Pan’s bonus is inflated, but he clearly belongs on this list.  The KMT ran a very weak candidate, and Pan crushed him.  Several other candidates had similar situations – a clear DPP majority in the district, a very weak KMT candidate, and a crushing victory.  These candidates include Lin Tai-hua 林岱樺, Huang Wei-cher 黃偉哲, and Chen Ting-fei 陳亭妃.

One person who you might think belongs in the above category but actually does not is Lin Shu-fen 林淑芬 (New Taipei 2).  Her district is only marginally pro-green.  In fact, it is almost exactly identical to neighboring New Taipei 3, which the DPP won by a razor-thin margin.  Lin Shu-fen turned her slight advantage into an overwhelming victory.  Note that the four candidates in the previous category and Lin Shu-fen are all incumbents.

There were five DPP candidates who won in majority blue districts.  In these districts, Tsai had less that 50%, but the legislative candidate significantly outpolled her and was able to transform defeat into victory.  These are the DPP superstars this year.  Three of the five are in Taichung, where the Tsai Ing-wen did not have a majority any district.  However, Tsai Chi-chang 蔡其昌, Lin Chia-lung 林佳龍, and Ho Hsin-chun 何欣純 ran 7.9%, 6.5%, and 4.3% ahead of her.  You can really see the importance of good candidates in these close Taichung races by the fact that Tsai Ing-wen actually got a higher vote share in Taichung 3 and Taichung 8 than in any of these three districts.  However, the DPP candidates in those two districts were extremely weak.  (Taichung 3 is Michael Turton’s home district.  This should make him puke.)  The other two DPP superstars were Yang Yao 楊曜 in Penghu and Wei Ming-ku 魏明谷 in Changhua 4.  Note that none of these five were incumbents.

Finally, there are three candidates who did very well in a losing effort.  Perng Shaw-jiin 彭紹瑾 and Chang Liao Wan-chien 張廖萬堅 both ran well ahead of Tsai, but they started from such a deep hole that even this nice performance didn’t come close to victory.  Kuo Jung-chung 郭榮宗 in Taoyuan 2 very nearly joined the superstar category.  However, he started from a deeper hole than any of those five, as Tsai only got 44.6% of the vote in his district, and it was a two candidate race with no minor candidates to siphon votes away from the KMT candidate.  Kuo ran 5.2% ahead of Tsai; he needed to run 5.5% ahead.  Regardless, Kuo, Perng, and Chang Liao can all hold their heads high in defeat.

Huang Jen-shu 黃仁杼 probably doesn’t belong on this list.  Part of Zhongli City is in Taoyuan 6, and that part, which has a heavy military population, is overwhelmingly blue.  Tsai’s vote includes all of Zhongli City, so it looks low. Tsai’s vote in Taoyuan 3 is higher, and Huang probably did not run far ahead of her, if at all.

 

I’ll look at the poor performers next time.