DPP vote share in Aboriginal townships

This election keeps surprising me. Looking through the results today with a few Aboriginal friends, we stumbled on another “Holy crap, dude!” finding.

As everyone knows, the DPP has never done well among Aboriginal voters, to put it kindly. In recent years, the DPP has slowly started to make small inroads into this demographic. Usually you can draw a direct connection to growth in the DPP’s vote share and control of a national or local government. Since the DPP doesn’t control the national government and only controlled a few local governments (all of which they had already controlled for significant periods of time and thus had presumably already picked all the low hanging fruits), this election cycle didn’t seem too promising.

One consistent trend is that the DPP has always done better in local mayoral/magistrate elections than in national presidential/gubernatorial elections.

I looked at the DPP vote share in 30 primarily Aboriginal townships around Taiwan. This is by no means a perfect measure of Aboriginal voting patterns. For one thing, it almost completely ignores Amis voters, who generally live in townships with majority Han populations. If you have extremely good local knowledge, you can separate the Amis villages from the Han villages, but that is beyond my knowledge and would take a lot of time. This also ignores the Aborigines who live in urban areas. Nonetheless, this may provide important evidence of the actual underlying trend. Here are the aggregate DPP vote shares in the 30 Aboriginal townships for local and national elections over the past two decades.

 

Look at the blue line for national elections first. If you ignore the peaks and valleys, you can see that the overall trend is a very slow increase. Now look at the red line for local elections. Again, if you ignore the peaks and valleys, it looks very similar to the national trend, except that it is about 10 points higher. Now look at the same chart with the 2014 data added:

 

This is an enormous leap into uncharted territory for the DPP. Moreover, this is the first major increase where I can’t point to DPP control of a national or local government.

I can’t say with any confidence what is happening. The obvious guess is that Aborigines, like the rest of the Taiwanese population, are fed up with the Ma government, and many previous supporters have voted for the DPP in protest. It will be interesting to see if the DPP can hold this support in the future.  Regardless, it is jarring to see the DPP win over a third of the votes in Aboriginal townships.

geography of the swing

As we wake up this morning, we are still trying to figure out where the hell that tidal wave that blindsided us last night came from. The polls gave us fair warning about some of the races. The Taipei result was clearly within the realm of possibility. I actually scribbled down a few back-of-the-envelope numbers a few days ago for Sean Lien’s vote share and came up with 41%. Of course, I didn’t believe that and I actually put down 44.5% for our office prediction pool, but the point is that you could have seen that result from the polling data. Similarly, Keelung City wasn’t a big surprise, and I wasn’t shocked that the DPP easily won in Yunlin or that the Nantou race ended up being pretty close. Some of the other results, though, simply came out of the blue. In particular, Taoyuan and Hsinchu City were complete shocks. I hadn’t seen any hints that those races might even be competitive. Taichung City, Changhua, Chiayi City, and New Taipei City were surprising to me, though not as unfathomable as Taoyuan and Hsinchu City. In general, the pre-election polls simply didn’t prepare us for yesterday’s results. So what did the polls completely miss?

The simplest answer is that many undecided voters made up their mind at the last minute to vote against the KMT. I have serious doubts about this, but there is no way to test this hypothesis with the data available right now. The KMT should hope that this was simply lots of last-minute decisions, since that would imply that the wave against the KMT was rooted in very shallow disapproval and could easily be reversed by 2016.

I suspect what may have happened is the emergence of the new economic cleavage as a powerful electoral force. I see two big groups of people who might have been vastly underrepresented in the surveys: younger people who have completely cut their landline connections and lower-wage labor who rent apartments in one district but vote in another. We have good reasons to believe that both of these groups are especially dissatisfied with the current government, so it is plausible that they were the bulk of the surprise wave. Of course, this will need a lot of testing before it is anything more than mere speculation.

Let’s look at the wave to see a few trends. I’m comparing the KMT’s performance in yesterday’s elections to the KMT’s 2012 presidential vote share. I know that comparing presidential votes to mayoral votes is like comparing apples to oranges, so don’t bombard me with complaints about this. The purpose of using the presidential vote as a baseline is precisely to strip away the local factors to see what the partisan balance used to be. The difference between the two elections is a combination of (1) the national wave and (2) the local factors specific to that race.

I usually look at things from the DPP’s point of view because that usually provides a clearer picture. In this election, however, I think it is more appropriate to look at things from the KMT side. For one thing, I think that this was almost certainly an anti-KMT wave driven by dissatisfaction with the national government rather than a pro-DPP wave driven by widespread attraction to the DPP and its platform. For another, the KMT only had one serious split (Keelung) while the DPP arguably had three (Changhua, Hsinchu City,and maybe Miaoli).

The six direct municipalities are the least localized of the races. If we see national forces acting on the existing partisan structure, it should be most evident in these races. So in the six direct municipalities, here is how the KMT fared:

City	2012 president	2014 mayor	Increase
Taipei	57.9%	40.8%	-17.1%
New Taipei	53.7%	50.1%	-3.6%
Taoyuan	57.2%	48.0%	-9.2%
Taichung	52.2%	42.9%	-9.3%
Tainan	39.8%	27.1%	-12.7%
Kaohsiung	44.2%	30.9%	-13.3%

Taipei City is by far the worst, but we expected that. Sean Lien was a special disaster, and the blue coalition broke apart in Taipei in a way that it did not anywhere else. In Tainan and Kaohsiung, extremely popular DPP incumbents were running against weak challengers. Here, the KMT dropped about 13%. In Taichung and Taoyuan, we had KMT incumbents running for re-election. In these two races, the KMT dropped 9%. New Taipei City is the obvious outlier. Eric Chu was also a KMT incumbent running for re-election, but the KMT vote in New Taipei dropped less than 4%. It was very surprising to many people (including me) that Chu made such a proud and aggressive victory speech last night. This is why. He can point out that he alone withstood the wave and, due to his personal popularity, held onto almost all of the previous KMT coalition. Even with his surprisingly narrow margin of victory, he is a clear winner in this election.

Another interesting facet of this wave is that it was much more powerful in the north than in the south.

City	2012 president	2014 mayor	Increase
Taipei	57.9%	40.8%	-17.1%
New Taipei	53.7%	50.1%	-3.6%
Keelung	59.3%	43.7%	-15.6%
.
Taoyuan	57.2%	48.0%	-9.2%
Hsinchu City	57.4%	37.9%	-19.5%
Hsinchu County	65.8%	46.9%	-18.9%
Miaoli	63.9%	46.6%	-17.3%
.
Taichung	52.2%	42.9%	-9.3%
Changhua	50.6%	39.6%	-11.0%
Nantou	54.6%	51.0%	-3.6%
.
Yunlin	41.7%	43.0%	+1.3%
Chiayi City	46.3%	45.5%	-0.8%
Chiayi County	39.0%	34.0%	-5.0%
Pingtung	42.9%	37.1%	-5.8%
Penghu	49.8%	44.7%	-5.1%
.
Yilan	44.9%	36.1%	-8.8%
Hualien
Taitung	39.8%	27.1%	-12.7%
Kinmen
Lienchiang

(Note: In Keelung, I included the votes for Huang Ching-tai and the official KMT nominee in the KMT’s vote share. I left off Hualien, Kinmen, and Lienchiang because those races did not run on party lines at all.)

In the north, there are specific local factors that depressed the KMT’s vote in nearly every race. Still, there was almost certainly a national effect underneath the local effects. The Taoyuan swing of -9% might be a fairly representative effect. In central Taiwan, both Taichung and Changhua also saw roughly 10% swings. However, once you get to southern Taiwan, things look different. Put aside Tainan and Kaohsiung (and their highly popular incumbents seeking re-election), and look at the mostly rural and more heavily agricultural south. The standard swing seems to be only about 5%, or about half that of northern and central Taiwan. I don’t want to cut things too fine here, but the crude pattern of a bigger swing in the north than in the south seems evident to me. (The fact that the KMT is stronger in the north and therefore has more votes to lose doesn’t account for the difference. If you divide the swing by the KMT’s 2012 vote share, the swing is still larger in the north than in the south.

Why? Again, these are all guesses at this point. I wonder if this has to do with urban labor forces. I think this pattern is compatible with the idea that the crucial group withdrawing support from the KMT is the lower income, renting, predominantly younger, wage labor or low-salaried labor force.

(Isn’t it intellectually thrilling to be bewildered!)

First reactions

As I write, the broad outlines of this election are coming into focus. At first glance, this is a tremendous loss for the KMT. The DPP is winning all the races that were supposed to be close by large margins, and the KMT is barely eking out victories in areas that it was supposed to win handily. It looks as if Eric Chu will barely survive, but John Wu will suffer an unthinkable upset loss in Taoyuan. The KMT will barely break 50% in Miaoli, and they might even lose Hsinchu City. Even without candidates in Taipei City, Hsinchu County, and Hualien County, the DPP might get more votes nationally than the KMT. This is simply stunning.

We are seeing a national wave of voters withdrawing previous support from the KMT. There are individual stories in each race, but the national trend is clearly against the KMT. What’s more, this is a trend that did not show up in pre-election polls. (Indeed, there was a huge mess of rumors claiming that various unpublished polls had showed the KMT closing the gap in Taichung City.) The easiest inference is that the wave of young voters came out overwhelmingly against the KMT. Young voters often do not reside in the place where they vote, so they might not have been counted in pre-election polls. Many people will attribute the result to Sunflower students going home in droves to vote, and they might be correct. However, this wave is so large that it might be more than that. It seems that people who were undecided broke against the KMT in the last few days. It could be that they were simply silent all along, or it could be that many of them made similar decisions in the last few days.

What is clear is that my earlier insistence that Sean Lien’s problems were all personal was missing a big part of the picture. I suggested that if the KMT lost Taoyuan, that would be a good indicator that something deeper was happening in Taiwan. Well, something deeper has happened.

More to come.

this year’s flag collection

While we wait for the votes to be counted, here are some of the flags that I have collected this year. Handheld flags are a completely different animal than the big flags that hang outdoors. The latter are basically billboards. They make impersonal statements to large numbers of people. Handheld flags are much more personal. They have two main purposes. First, most are handed out at rallies, and they help people to participate. It is much easier to wave a flag than to wave an empty hand. When someone makes a good point or yells “frozen garlic,” you can shake your flag wildly back at them. And once you are physically engaged, you listen more carefully and are more likely to do something even more participatory, such as yell your approval. In short, a rally of 5000 people with flags in their hands is going to be much more passionate than the same exact rally of 5000 people without flags. Second, you can take the flag home with you, where it serves as a reminder and a connection to the candidate. If you want to tell guests who you support, you can put it out in the open and nothing confrontational needs to be said. You can let children play with it so that they think your favorite party is fun and awesome. Handheld flags are a great value for a very limited expenditure.

You will note that there are more DPP flags than KMT flags in my collection this year. Lots of KMT candidates who I asked for flags told me they didn’t print any this year. I can only shake my head at this decision.

 

Here are the seven rainbow flags from Ko Wen-je’s march last weekend. I’m not sure if this is all of them or if there was an eighth color that I am missing. Personally, I prefer flags with the candidate’s name proudly emblazoned on them.

Here are the mayors and magistrates. Note the absence of any Ko Wen-je or Eric Chu flag. Ko proudly announced he was running a “different” campaign and wouldn’t print flags. (Pay no attention to the previous picture.) Chu apparently didn’t have to bother with campaigning, since his office didn’t have any flags when I dropped by. I suspect he eventually got around to printing some, though.

Here are my flags from New Taipei City. The top row is the three DPP candidates from Zhonghe District.

These are the four city council main candidates from Taichung 10. Only three can win. The teddy bear may be in danger.

Taipei City city council candidates. I really dislike the tall, narrow flags on the right. They are a terrible shape for waving at rallies.

This is the everything else category. I found a couple others in my car later on. Sorry Chung Hsiao-ping 鍾小平 and Chen Yi-chou 陳義洲.

Maybe this is the most appropriate way to show them. Elections are supposed to be a little chaotic.

 

And now I will put them away, with only a few going out on display in my private museum.

 

 

some campaign ads

I have a few photos that I’d like to chat about. There really isn’t a common theme other than that these are all part of the visual campaign.

I found these two photos on the internet, where they have gotten quite a bit of media attention.  The first one was put up next to an ad for KMT Chiayi City mayoral candidate Chen Yi-chen and says, “voting for Chen Yi-chen is supporting Ma Ying-jeou.” The second one is from Yilan County, where the KMT member Lin Tzu-miao is running for re-election as mayor of Luodong Township. Her ad says, “Ma Ying-jeou does not equal to Lin Tzu-miao; [DPP county magistrate] Lin Tsung-hsien does not equal [DPP mayor candidate] Lin Shih-chi.”

Both of these ads are about the same theme. President Ma is very unpopular right now, and, especially in DPP-leaning areas such as Chiayi City or Luodong Township, DPP candidates would love for voters to vote based on how they feel about President Ma. In Chiayi, the local KMT candidate first reacted to this ad by calling it a dirty trick and illogical, then she avoided publicly campaigning with Ma, and finally, because that caused a backlash among deep blue voters, she had to make a very public appearance with him. In Luodong, where there are far fewer deep blue votes, the local KMT candidate has taken the initiative to publicly separate herself from Ma. She tries to make this into a purely local affair by also insinuating that her opponent is no Lin Tsung-hsien and voters should not consider either Ma or Lin but only her and her opponent. (Note: Lin preceded her as Luodong mayor before he became county magistrate, so Luodong voters presumably have fond memories of his tenure.)

I love seeing these ads. I believe strongly in representative democracy, but representative democracy only works with healthy party politics. Collective responsibility is at the heart of the system. If the whole party is punished whenever one member does something terrible, then the whole party has a strong incentive to constrain the individual members. It is nearly impossible to fight corruption one person at a time, but it is possible to vote out a party riddled by corruption. If a party leader tries some policy that is widely unpopular, the whole party should suffer the consequences. Again, this provides a strong incentive for party members to dissuade a leader from going in a strange and unpopular direction. If this collective constraining keeps party members advocating the same platform, it becomes much easier for voters to understand what a party stands for. That, in turn, allows them to make choices consistent with their own values. In a sense, constraining members is the single most important thing that political parties do.

One of the things that I have been particularly perturbed by over the past year is that the KMT has not revolted against President Ma’s leadership. A president with an approval rating consistently below 20% should face challenges to his power. Ma has become somewhat more impotent. The KMT legislative caucus has blatantly refused to follow his orders and pass the Services Trade Agreement or even the Oversight Mechanism. (Ma publicly blames this on the DPP, but if his caucus were united in wanting to pass it, they would pass it. It hasn’t passed because the KMT is divided, and the opponents are more scared of their voters than of President Ma.) However, with such extreme unpopularity, I would normally expect much more blatant rebellion. Finally, these sorts of ads force that tension out into the open.

I came across this ad while researching the post on independence alliances. I have never seen such a phalanx of female political power in a campaign ad. It’s not just that there are lots of women in the picture; it’s also that they are both powerful and mostly local. Lin Hsiang-ting is running in Chiayi County, and she is supported by the party chair (and presidential contender), the incumbent county magistrate, two Chiayi township mayors, as well as two prominent legislators from Tainan, just over the county line. This ad would have been unthinkable when I arrived in Taiwan. For one thing, the DPP barely had any local officeholders a generation ago, much less an army of prominent female politicians. For another, I’m not sure a candidate would have wanted to produce this ad for fear of widespread male chauvinism among rural voters.

Taiwan has seen an upsurge in female officeholders since democratization. The percentage of women in elected offices has risen globally over the past few decades, but it has gone up faster in Taiwan than elsewhere. I have written a few papers arguing that one of the drivers of this trend is the reserved female seat system in the SNTV (multi-member seat districts) electoral system. This is the rule that for every four seats a district elects, at least one must be won by a woman. Most people think of it as a largely useless and even anachronistic or embarrassing rule. It is almost never invoked, so most people think it has no effect. This couldn’t be more wrong. The rule drives parties to identify and cultivate female candidates so that those seats won’t go to their opponents. In districts without reserved seats, parties don’t have the same strong imperative and nominate (and elect) far fewer women.

Since the system is most effective with competitive party politics and multi-member districts, the direct municipalities should be the sweet spot. In fact, they are. In the six municipalities, over 35% of seats are currently held by women. If these six municipalities were a national legislature, they would rank #24 in the world. I’m going to be watching closely to see if that number goes up significantly in this election.

In the last few days, everyone screams danger! In this photo, five different candidates are begging voters to save them. In a multi-member district, the worst thing that can happen to a candidate is for voters to think they are safe. If a candidate is safe, (s)he doesn’t need your vote. Lots of candidates have suffered shocking losses due to overconfidence.

Wu Chih-kang (Wu Po-hsiung’s other son) understands this. “Safe victory means losing; don’t let fake surveys create another tragedy.” I don’t know that there actually were any surveys published for his city council district (Taipei 5), but credible surveys can be deadly. Surveys have caused so many unexpected losses that there is a name for the phenomenon, “the curse of number one.”

This candidate is not quite so bright. Many city council candidates will plead with their supporters to concentrate all their family’s votes and not to ration them out to several candidates. This particular candidate is running for neighborhood head, which is a single-seat election, but he is still pleading with supporters to concentrate their votes on him. Voters don’t need to ration out votes to try to elect three or four people in this kind of election. There isn’t even a possibility of strategic voting in this race since there are only two candidates. The only explanation for this appeal that I can think of is that everyone else is doing it, so he thinks he should say the magic phrase too.

Quick, which party is this candidate from? You’d never know from the color scheme that he is a DPP nominee. In fact, Lin You-chang has served as party spokesperson under Tsai Ing-wen, so it’s not like he is a fringe party member.

Lin’s two main foes in the Keelung City mayoral race are trying like hell to be his primary opponent. Unfortunately, they seem to be roughly tied, which is the worst possible position. They both want to convince blue camp supporters that the other one is hopeless. I like Hsieh’s slogan, “Dump Huang (yellow), save blue.” It not only invokes the dump-save formula, it also intimates that Hsieh is the real representative of the blue camp. Huang’s banner is more direct. This is a contest between Huang and Lin, and a vote for Hsieh is a vote for Lin.

Right across the bridge from those two banners, there is another pair of banners. Hsieh’s is the same, but Huang’s is somewhat earthier. Angry, fed up, and &@!#* voters should vote for Huang. Huang’s main appeal has been that the KMT is oppressing him. He has been treated unfairly, and he is pissed off.

The little yellow ribbon under the sign says, “Give Huang Ching-tai justice.” This is reminiscent of the authoritarian era, when Tangwai candidates threatened with prison sentences would tell voters that they expected no justice from the judicial system and their only hope was for the voters to give them justice. We’ve gotten several fliers about how oppressive the system is and reminding us about the injustices of the KMT going back to 228. Huang has been in prison without bail for a couple of months, and he thinks he is being politically persecuted. Both he and his brother, who is running the campaign in Huang’s absence, are on hunger strikes right now. The only minor thing is, we are supposed to have forgotten why Huang is in prison. He wasn’t arrested for throwing a shoe at President Ma or anything like that. He’s corrupt, and he got caught. Now he’s angry at the KMT for treating him unfairly, but we aren’t supposed to remember that he was a loyal KMT member who never talked about things like 228 until just a few months ago.

Finally, here is a picture of lots of flags. I love seeing a lot of flags everywhere. It gives the atmosphere of election season and makes me think happy thoughts about democracy in action. Some people love seeing Christmas decorations everywhere; I love election decorations. Unfortunately, this may be the last time we see such a scene. It seems the powers that be have come to a conclusion that this is visual pollution and have agreed to ban as much as possible. You will still be free to put up all the billboards you can afford, but unpaid banners and flags covering public spaces may be a thing of the past. Taichung is particularly sterile this year, and I mourn this development.

independence alliances

There are three big political forces representing the independence wing of the political spectrum that have nominated candidates for city and county councilors this year. They are the TSU, Chen Shui-bian’s One Country, One Side Alliance (OSOCA), and the Taiwan Independence Alliance (TIA). If I understand correctly the TIA was formed earlier this year by a number of groups that supported independence as well as some of the Sunflower student groups.

The OSOCA published a roster of candidates it has endorsed in an ad in today’s Liberty Times. I obtained the roster of candidates endorsed by TIA from their Facebook page. (The TSU’s candidates are easily found in all the official government sources.) I’m reproducing them here so I’ll be able to find them in five or ten years.

In the meantime, let’s look at the nominations of the three forces competing to be the preeminent force for independence. From the rosters, it is clear that they have focused much more on the six direct municipalities than on the other sixteen cities and counties. This makes sense. City council elections in the six direct municipalities run much more on national issues. Local issues still matter, but not nearly as much as in the smaller cities and counties. As such, it is probably easier to convince a voter in Taipei or Taichung to cast a city council vote for independence than it is to convince a similar voter in Penghu or Yunlin to do the same. When was the last time you heard a Yunlin county councilor say anything important about independence (or anything relating to national politics, for that matter)?

There are a few weird patterns in the city and county councilor endorsements. Am I the only one shocked that every DPP candidate in Keelung City is on the TIA roster, but neither of the alliances was able to field many candidates in Yunlin? I suspect there are interesting stories, but you probably have to know all the little details of each local soap opera to really understand what is going on.

For now, let’s concentrate on the six direct municipalities. Here is a summary table of each group’s endorsements:

	OSOCA	TIA	TSU
Total candidates endorsed	58	40	29
# districts with zero/one/two candidate(s)	18/44/7	33/32/4	41/27/1
Party affiliations (D / T / I)	52/0/6	29/10/1	0/29/0
Newcomers / Incumbents	12/46	22/18	24/5

The normal way to judge an alliance like this is to ask how many of their candidates were elected. I don’t think that is the best way to think about things. These are, after all, local elections, and the vast majority of voters will be voting for other considerations. If, for example, Wang Shih-chien wins in Taipei 4, should we interpret it as a victory for OSOCA? There are a number of compelling alternative reasons that Wang might win, including his years of constituency service, his personal charisma, the DPP’s popularity and conservative nomination strategy in his district, and his statement earlier this year that Sean Lien could win the mayoral race “over my dead body.” Wang’s membership in OSOCA is probably only a minor part of his political strength.

Rather than thinking about things from a voter’s point of view, it is more enlightening to think about things from the candidate’s and the alliance organizers’ points of view. The alliance organizers are not like political parties in that they do not nominate candidates. Rather, they look at the field of candidates already running and offer to endorse some of them. For each candidate, the organizer has to make a decision on whether to endorse them. The organizer has to balance two goals. On the one hand, the organizer wants candidates who share the alliance’s values. On the other hand, the organizer wants candidates who will win. If you have to choose between a candidate who shares your values 100% but only has a 1% chance of winning and another candidate who only agrees 80% with your values but has an 80% chance of winning, you’ll probably advance your organization’s goals more effectively with the latter candidate.

The candidate makes a similar calculation. Endorsement by an alliance may not, by itself, secure victory. However, if the candidate judges that association with the alliance will attract more votes than it will scare off, then he or she should welcome the endorsement. If the endorsement brings 500 extra votes, great! 500 votes could be the difference between victory and defeat. Each candidate will make a different judgment of the value of an endorsement based on all kinds of factors.

In SNTV elections with multi-member districts, factions, small parties, and electoral alliances prefer to only nominate one candidate per district. This allows them to concentrate their support on that candidate instead of worrying how to ration votes among multiple candidates. For an election alliance, this also allows them to maximize their value to each potential endorsee. A candidate might also want to be the sole endorsee in the district. Association with an extreme position could scare away the same number of moderate voters regardless of how many people are endorse, so you don’t want the share the benefit with anyone else.

The alliance organizer wants to put together the strongest possible roster of candidates, while the strongest candidates will only want to be affiliated with the alliance if they can monopolize its endorsement and they judge that endorsement to be a net vote winner. Thus, by looking at what kinds of candidates are on the rosters of each alliance, we can make judgments about the political strength of each of the groups vying to lead the Taiwan Independence movement.

Looking at the summary table above, it is evident that the OSOCA has put together a very strong roster. They have endorsed a candidate in 51 of the 69 districts (not counting Aboriginal districts) in the six direct municipalities. The TIA could only find candidates for 36 districts, and the TSU only nominated in 28 districts. (18 candidates were endorsed by both OSOCA and TIA.) The best indicator of candidate quality is whether the candidate is an incumbent or not. Again, OSOCA has by far the best roster. 79% of OSOCA candidates are incumbents, while only 55% of TIA and a mere 17% of TSU candidates won four years ago.

The two alliances have somewhat different partisan strategies. Both alliances are dominated by DPP candidates. This is perhaps natural, since most of the candidates on the green side of the political divide are DPP members. As a general rule, the strongest politicians tend to affiliate with one of the two big parties, so finding DPP politicians who are willing to accept an endorsement is a mark of credibility for OSOCA and TIA. (Interestingly, neither alliance seems to have endorsed any New Tide members, though I could be wrong about that.) The main difference is in the non-DPP candidates. TIA has endorsed several TSU nominees, while OSOCA has entirely separated itself from the TSU. When OSOCA endorses non-DPP candidates, they are independents with proven electoral track records.

The main lesson of this exercise is that Chen Shui-bian evidently still appeals to a large enough segment of the electorate that many established politicians are willing to associate themselves with him, at least in elections with multi-member districts. In contrast, the TSU appears to continue to lag far behind at the grassroots level.

Of course, it is possible that a particularly large proportion of one of these rosters will unexpectedly win or lose. The politicians set up the question as they like, but the voters always have the final move.

 

Here are the rosters for the two alliances.

		OSOCA	Party	Inc?	TIA	Party	Inc?
台北市	1	林世宗 陳慈慧	D D	Y	王奕凱	I
	2	江志銘	D	Y
	3	許家蓓	D		李卓翰	T
	4	王世堅	D	Y	黃向群	D
	5	童仲彥	D	Y	童仲彥	D	Y
	6
新北市	1
	2	陳科名	D	Y
	3	陳啟能	D	Y	鄭金隆 陳啟能	D D	Y Y
	4	王淑惠	D	Y
	5	林秀惠	D	Y
	6	許昭興	D	Y
	7	吳琪銘	D	Y
	8				陳永福	D	Y
	9
	10	周雅玲	D	Y
桃園市	1	廖輝星	D	Y
	2
	3	張文瑜	I	Y
	4
	5
	6				曾慶章	D
	7	黃傅淑香	D	Y	黃治東	T
	8
	9
	10
	11
	12
台中市	1	吳敏濟	D	Y	吳敏濟	D	Y
	2	楊典忠	D	Y	楊典忠 陳年添	D T	Y
	3	劉淑蘭	D		劉淑蘭	D
	4	翁美春	D	Y	吳富亭	T
	5	林竹旺	I		張雅旻	D
	6	陳淑華	D	Y	陳淑華	D	Y
	7	何文海	D	Y	張耀中 黃聖硯	D T	Y
	8	曾朝榮	D	Y	曾朝榮	D	Y
	9	范淞育	D		賴佳微	D	Y
	10	江肇國	D		江肇國	D
	11	邱素貞 何敏誠	D D	Y Y	邱素貞	D	Y
	12	何明杰	D	Y	何明杰	D	Y
	13	劉錦和 李天生	D D	Y Y	劉錦和 林明正	D T	Y
	14	蔡成圭	D	Y
台南市	1				劉米山	D
	2	賴惠員 趙昆原	D I	Y	賴惠員	D	Y
	3	侯澄財	D	Y
	4	郭秀珠	I	Y
	5	陳朝來	D	Y
	6	梁順發	D	Y
	7	林志聰	D	Y	林志聰	D	Y
	8	王峻潭	D	Y
	9	施重男	I	Y	陳秋萍	D	Y
	10	郭信良 唐儀靜	D D	Y	郭信良	D	Y
	11	陳怡珍 唐碧娥	D D	Y Y	陳怡珍	D	Y
	12	邱莉莉	D	Y
	13	李文正	D	Y	李文正	D	Y
	14	蔡旺詮	D	Y	陳昌輝	T
	15	周明德	D		周明德	D
	16	曾王雅雲 劉正昌	D D	Y	曾王雅雲	D	Y
高雄市	1	蕭育穎	D		林富寶	D	Y
	2	張文瑞	D	Y
	3	陳政聞	D	Y	翁瑞珠	D	Y
	4
	5	林芳如	D	Y
	6				陳冠銘	T
	7	鄭新助	I	Y
	8				楊定國	T
	9	陳慧文	D	Y
	10				蕭吉男	T
	11	李雨庭	D

 

 

 

		OSOCA	Party	Inc?	TIA	Party	Inc?
基隆市	1				詹春陽	D	Y
	2				陳東財	D	Y
	3	陳建雄	D		游祥耀 陳建雄	D D	Y
	4				施世明 張錦煌	D D	Y Y
	5				洪森永 蔡適應 陳志成	D D D	Y Y Y
	6				林明智	D
	7				蘇仁和 張美瓊	D D	Y
宜蘭縣	1	林志鴻	D		林志鴻 張曜顯 吳福田	D D D	Y
	3				吳宏謀	D	Y
	6				黃素琴	D	Y
	8				薛呈懿	Tree
	9				陳文昌	D
新竹市	1				楊志翔	Green
	2				鍾淑姬	I
	4	李姸慧	I	Y	吳秋穀 李姸慧	D I	Y Y
苗栗縣	4	林一方	Green		林一方	Green
	6	陳春暖	D
彰化縣	1	葉孟家	D		黃秀芳 林維浩 賴岸璋 陳冠鴻	D D D I	Y   Y
	2	陳秀寳	D	Y	陳秀寳	D	Y
	3	王國忠	D		王國忠	D
	4	彭國成	D		彭國成	D
	5	歐陽蓁珠	D		歐陽蓁珠	D
	6	許書維	D		許書維	D
	7	李俊諭	D	Y	李俊諭 江熊一楓	D D	Y Y
	8				洪遊江	T
南投縣	1	賴燕雪	D	Y	賴燕雪 蕭文進	D T	Y
	2	林永鴻	D	Y	廖梓佑	D	Y
	3	陳昭煜	D	Y	陳昭煜	D	Y
	4	張志銘	D
	5	許阿甘	D	Y	許阿甘	D	Y
雲林縣	1	江文登	D	Y	林政亨	T
	2				林樹山	D
	3				李錫銘	T
嘉義市	1				蔡永泉 林瑞霞	T I	Y
	2	蔡文旭 王美惠	D D	Y Y	陳幸枝 蔡文旭 王美惠 李孟哲	D D D T	Y Y Y
嘉義縣	1	林緗亭	D		林緗亭	D
	2	黃嘉寬	D	Y	黃嘉寬 林山景	D T	Y
	3	詹金繪	D	Y
	4	蔡鼎三 黃嫈珺	D D	Y Y	蔡鼎三 黃嫈珺	D D	Y Y
	6				何子凡	I
屏東縣	1				李世斌	D	Y
	3				潘淑眞	D	Y
	4				許展維	D
	6				鍾乙豪	D
台東縣	1	林參天	I	Y
花蓮縣	1				莊枝財	D	Y
	3				謝明圳	I
澎湖縣
金門縣
連江縣

 

The lesson of the Taipei mayoral race

As election day nears, it looks like the KMT will do miserably in Taipei City. Even if Sean Lien 連勝文 somehow manages, against all polls and all expert prognostications, to win, nearly everyone expects him to do worse than any previous KMT candidate in Taipei who has had the blue side of the political spectrum all to himself. Once the results are in, the next question to ask is, what does it mean?

The ways that people are encouraging us to understand this election and its implications seem to depend primarily on whether they think this election is mostly about Ko 柯文哲 and his campaign or mostly about Lien and his campaign.

On one side, there are people who focus on the Ko camp. The things that they tend to look at are the inclusive nature of his appeals and Ko’s incorporation of the Sunflower student movement’s ideals and energy. In this discourse, Ko’s campaign is creating something new in Taiwanese politics by transcending the old blue and green cleavage lines and building a genuine bottom-up approach to solving political problems. Ko is also explicitly rejecting politics for the privileged few, especially the business elites who deal with China. This new force has the potential to transform the current party system and radically reshape all Taiwanese politics. I think these two articles are good statements of the vision of this first discourse.

On the other side, there are people who think that the Taipei race is almost entirely about the failings of the Lien campaign. I am firmly in this camp. If you buy this argument, the implications of the current election are far less reaching. The primary lesson is that the KMT can’t afford to nominate terrible candidates, even in its strongest districts. This bodes well for Eric Chu 朱立倫, who is widely seen as the KMT’s most appealing choice in 2016.

 

Why do I think this election is mostly about Lien? If a voter who has always voted for a particular party suddenly changes her behavior, there are two common stories. First, something fundamental could have caused the voter to reassess her values or the implications of those values and led her to conclude that she should change sides. If large numbers of voters all do this at the same time and in the same direction, the party system can be fundamentally revamped in a “critical election.” However, critical elections are rare. The American scholars who developed the idea thought that the USA had had critical elections in 1868, 1896, and 1932, following the US Civil War, the Panic of 1893 (and associated economic dislocations all over rural America), and the Great Depression. In other words, it takes a cataclysmic, once-in-a-generation event to produce a critical election. The Sunflower protests undoubtedly shook Taiwan, but did they rock it to its very core? The second possibility is less demanding. In a “deviating election,” voters don’t fundamentally change their underlying values or preferences, but they vote against their normal pattern based (usually) on the characteristics of the specific candidates on the ballot. I think this is what we are seeing. Many voters who have always voted blue are looking at Sean Lien and finding him personally inadequate as a potential mayor.

We are starting to see a number of stories about just how terrible Lien has been. The best one I have seen is from Julian Kuo 郭正亮, who is one of the most perceptive minds in the DPP. In this article, Kuo paints Lien as unprepared to be mayor. Lien has complained that Ko and the media won’t focus on his policy proposals, but Kuo points out several specific examples of how Lien’s policy proposals were poorly thought out and hastily discarded once the inevitable objections were raised. The media hasn’t taken Lien’s policies seriously because they were not serious proposals. Similarly, Lien hasn’t been sufficiently prepared for basic campaign events, and so he has talked to people using liquid gas in tanks about problems associated with piped natural gas and made basic gaffes such as not knowing the number of neighborhoods 里in Taipei City.

One of the things that many commentators miss is how hard you have to prepare to run for office. You can’t just drop in, look pretty, and expect to win an election, as this idiotic column suggests “princess” Chen Yi-chen 陳以真 is doing in Chiayi City. You have to have thought about what you want to do, studied the concrete problems facing the electorate, listened to different experts explain why different proposals will or will not work, considered how different constituencies will react to each proposal, and so on. In other words, you need a year or two of intensive preparation in order to run for office. We tend to overlook this because all the serious candidates do their homework. If they don’t, it filters out into the electorate. Media treats them with less respect, party workers privately express disgust to people they know, the opposition camp gleefully repeats stories of the candidate’s ineptitude, and voters learn, often indirectly, that the candidate is simply not ready to hold office.

(In USA politics, Bob Kerrey is a great example. Everyone expected Bob Kerrey to win the Democratic nomination in 1992. He was a charismatic war hero and seemed to be head and shoulders above the rest of the field. However, the media and voters in Iowa and New Hampshire soon realized that he was a one-trick pony. His answer to every question was “national health care.” How do we fix the economy? National health care. Should we lower taxes? National health care will resolve that problem. Should we dismantle our arsenal of nuclear weapons now that the Cold War is over? With national health care, we won’t have to worry about nuclear weapons. It didn’t take long for the media to stop taking Bob Kerrey seriously, and his campaign limped out of New Hampshire fatally wounded. The nomination and presidency eventually went to someone who was always thoroughly prepared to chat in depth on any policy proposal, Bill Clinton. In case you are wondering about George W. Bush, he is not a counter-example. One of the critical steps in his path to the presidency was an audience with former Secretary of State George Schultz and several other serious Republican policy elders in early 1999. Bush impressed them enough for them to spread the word out through various channels that Bush was viable and Republicans could wholeheartedly support him. This private vetting and unofficial endorsement by the party elders effectively turned Bush into the frontrunner for the party’s nomination.)

If Sean Lien had been adequately prepared for this race, I suspect that Taipei would have turned out much like the current Taoyuan race. In Taoyuan, another district with a predominance of voters who generally vote blue, John Wu 吳志揚 faces many of the same complaints about inheriting his status as Lien. However, after stints in the legislature and a term as county chief, Wu can convincingly talk about the details of governing Taoyuan. For most blue voters, Wu is sufficiently competent and they can therefore vote for him. To be sure, national-level factors such as President Ma’s unpopularity will eat away at the normal KMT margin of victory. However, the blue coalition is not imploding in Taoyuan the way it is in Taipei. Faced with a more prepared Lien, Ko’s camp might have made the same inclusive and bottom-up appeals, but I doubt they would have had much effect.

In short, this election may be a lot less meaningful than many people believe. If Wu loses in Taoyuan, I might start to buy into the ideas that Taiwanese voters want a wholesale rejection of the comprador class or that significant slices of the electorate were transformed by the Sunflower movement. In the meantime, the least demanding explanation is simply that Sean Lien is going to lose because he was too lazy to spend a year or two intensively preparing for the election.

evolution of the political map and money politics

In the last week before the election, all signs point to a good election night for the DPP. This should be their best local election since the 1997 landslide. Since that particular election is burned vividly into my memory, I thought I’d go back and look at a couple of things that have changed since then. In particular, I want to discuss (1) geography and how the political map has changed (2) the way that money politics is different today than a generation ago.

 

In 1997, the DPP’s victory was almost unbelievable in geographic scope. Taipei and Kaohsiung Cities were not up for election, but all the other cities and counties were. The DPP won nearly every major race. In the south, the DPP held power in Kaoshiung County and Tainan County, they took back power in Pingtung, won a messy four-way race in Tainan City, and their ally, Chang Po-ya 張博雅(now the head of the Control Yuan) won a fifth consecutive term for the Hsu family dynasty in Chiayi City. In the north, the DPP easily retained power in Yilan County, won a tough three-way race in Hsinchu County, somehow held Taoyuan County (where Annette Lu 呂秀蓮 had won the office in a by-election a year earlier), won an outright majority in Hsinchu City, and narrowly edged out the KMT in the biggest prize, Taipei County. The DPP even won in Taichung City and County. They didn’t win in Nantou, but former DPP legislator Peng Pai-hsien 彭百顯 edged out both the DPP and KMT nominees to take that race. It could have been even worse for the KMT. They barely squeezed out victories in Changhua and Yunlin, the two biggest districts they held onto. In terms of numbers of cities and counties that each party won, it didn’t look so bad since the KMT won all the little districts. However, the DPP ended up governing about 80% of Taiwan’s population.

Today, that looks a little strange. The KMT’s last redoubt was in Changhua, Yunlin, and Chiayi County. Today, Yunlin and Chiayi usually can be counted on to vote for the DPP, and Changhua is far from a reliable area for either party. Today it would be nearly unthinkable for the DPP to sweep Taoyuan, Hsinchu County, and Hsinchu City. It seemed far less impossible then. The DPP had held the Hsinchu County government since 1989, and it had been very strong in several elections in Hsinchu City during the 1980s.

Many of us don’t realize (or can easily forget) just how much the political map has changed. In the 1990s, we didn’t talk so much about the blue north and green south. Rather, the DPP had strength in the north and south, but central Taiwan was often thought of as a “democratic desert.” Perhaps the best way to see the changes is to look at the DPP’s vote in national elections over the years.

	national	north	mid-north	central	mid-south	south	E/F
1994	39.4	41.7	33.8	36.3	43.8	40.6	26.3
2000	39.3	37.4	30.0	37.4	49.5	46.2	20.5
2004	50.1	45.9	42.5	50.5	59.6	57.0	29.1
2008	41.6	38.4	32.9	40.5	51.0	49.7	21.8
2012	45.6	42.2	37.4	44.9	57.0	53.6	25.1
(12-94)	6.2	0.5	3.6	8.6	13.2	13.0	-1.2

North: Taipei City and County, Keelung City, Yilan County

Mid-north: Taoyuan County, Hsinchu City and County, Miaoli County

Central: Taichung City and County, Changhua County, Nantou County

Mid-south: Yunlin County, Chiayi City and County, Tainan City and County

South: Kaohsiung City and County, Pingtung County, Penghu County

East/Fujian: Taitung, Hualien, Kinmen, Lienchiang (1994: Taitung, Hualien only)

 

Ignore the East/Fujian category; it is much smaller than the other five regions. It is also geographically incoherent.

In 1994, look at how close the other five regions were to each other. From the weakest to the strongest, the difference was only 10%. Moreover, the north was actually a better region for the DPP than the south. Today that is unthinkable. By 2012, the difference between the weakest and strongest regions had grown to 20%, and the south was about 8% better than the north.

Now look at the difference between 1994 and 2012 for each region. The north has barely changed (+0.5%), the mid-north has slightly increased, the center somewhat more, and the mid-south and south have both increased by a whopping 13%. The DPP’s gains over the past generation have come almost entirely in the southern half of the island.

This is what we mean when we talk about the south turning green and the north turning blue. In an absolute sense, the north hasn’t really gotten bluer. However, relative to the national average, the north and mid-north look far bluer than they did a generation ago. The southern half of the island is, of course, much greener. The central region, rather than being a “democratic desert” halfway between DPP bastions in the north and south, has become the bellwether area. As goes the center, so goes Taiwan.

 

You will notice that the mid-south has always been the DPP’s best area in national elections. However, it has not always been the DPP’s best area in local elections. In 1997, when the DPP won nearly everything else, it could not win Yunlin or Chiayi Counties. Somehow the KMT managed to maintain control of local politics in what objectively should have been the DPP’s best area. In the past 20 years, however, the KMT has completely lost this control. This gets me to my second big change in the past generation: money.

Money is emerging as a defining issue in current politics, but it runs on a very different logic today than a generation ago. Now we are increasingly aware of the power of large, multinational conglomerates that have extended their reach through every facet of Taiwan’s society. The old picture of an economy dominated by small and medium businesses (with a lot of family businesses) and a large middle class seems less and less accurate as a description of today’s Taiwan. Moreover, almost all businesses have established extensive ties with China. They either do their manufacturing in China, or they want to access China’s enormous domestic market. Because of these ties, economic inequality is increasingly bound together with identity politics.

A generation ago, businesses were just starting the move to China, and China itself was far poorer, less powerful, and had a much less aggressive foreign policy. The KMT, headed by Lee Teng-hui, was encouraging a Go-Slow policy for businesses toward China. The USA was still by far Taiwan’s most important market and trading partner.

Nevertheless, money in politics was one of the defining issues in the 1997 election. More specifically, the election was all about what voters called black and gold politics. Black referred to organized crime, and during the 1990s organized crime increasingly penetrated local politics. Following the spectacular police crackdowns on organized crime in the late CCK era, crime figures started to run for elected office as a way of gaining legal protection. If a crime boss was in the county assembly and could threaten to cut the local county police budget, the police learned quickly to back off. Minor crime figures ran for township councils, more important ones ran for county assemblies, and the biggest ones ran for the legislature. The ever-increasing presence of organized crime in elected offices led to more and more violence in local politics, larger and more ostentatious brothels and gambling parlors (you couldn’t miss the garish neon lights), and more petty and violent crime.

Local KMT factions had always used local government budgets to feed their electoral machines, and this continued in the 1990s. If you needed to build a road or a school, your friendly local contractor would inflate the budget, skimp on materials, and kick back 10% to the politicians. This could then be recycled back into politics. Candidates amassed huge war chests to buy votes at ever-increasing prices. Organized crime turned out to be very good at vote-buying. On the one hand, they had lots of tough young men who could either buy votes or scare off the vote buyers for rival candidates. On the other hand, they could remind voters who took the money that their ballot box had better have a lot of votes for the right candidate or else…

Anger against black and gold politics came to a climax in the summer of 1997 when actress Bai Bing-bing’s 白冰冰 daughter was kidnapped by a gang. The whole country watched on TV as the police incompetently tried to raid their hideout completely unaware that the gang was listening in on the police radio. When the gang killed Bai’s daughter, the nation was outraged. There was a massive protest in Taipei calling only for President Lee to apologize and Premier Lien to resign. A week before the election, the case flared up again when the last gang member stormed the South African embassy and held the Ambassador and his family hostage. Frank Hsieh 謝長廷 emerged the hero by going in to negotiate the gang member’s surrender and coming out with the Ambassador’s baby. When people went to vote the next weekend, black and gold issues were at the front of their considerations.

Today, even in local politics, money operates in different ways. On the one hand, if you try to play the traditional game of recycling money through local construction projects, it doesn’t work as well. On the one hand, prosecutors have much better tools for sniffing out corruption and more leeway to pursue those cases in court. On the other hand, the presence of organized crime has diminished considerably. There is much less (visible) prostitution and gambling. Vote buying doesn’t work as well as it used to. Perhaps most importantly, administrative reform in 2010 eliminated local township governments in Taipei, Taichung, Tainan, and Kaohsiung Counties, removing a vital source of cash in many of the most prosperous areas of Taiwan.

Of course, building stuff in the old ways is still attractive, but the future might be in the John Wu 吳志揚 Taoyuan model. As Michael Cole has repeatedly reminded us over the past few years, the Taoyuan government is pursuing an enormous development plan around the airport. However, rather than handing off contracts to lots of small time local cronies, Wu has invited big Chinese investors to come in and fund the project. It is hard to know exactly how the money is then recycled, but it doesn’t take much imagination to speculate that these Chinese investors repay the favor with political influence for Wu’s (or allies’) business dealings in China.

This may be simplifying things too much, but it seems to me that the old factional politics that used to be the basis of KMT local power in central and southern Taiwan have simply become much less lucrative. As the money slowed down to a trickle, faction politics were squeezed out by party politics. Since the DPP had always had quite a bit of sympathy bubbling under the surface in the south, once the factions weakened, it was nearly impossible for the KMT to maintain its partisan hold on those local governments. What was left of the factions switched sides and transferred their remaining support to the DPP. In the center where the two parties are much more evenly balanced, the factions have not yet made the same move en masse, but a few people have switched sides. In the north, the DPP had much less support and the factions have not been tempted to change sides. Now in Taoyuan, Wu may have figured out how to marry the traditional construction development state model with the new integration into the Chinese market. This new source of money might allow him and the KMT to maintain and reinforce their coalition of ideological supporters (of whom Taoyuan has always had many) and the watermelon faction who go wherever their economic interests point them.

 

Ko parade

This afternoon, the Ko campaign held a big parade in Taipei City. Again, I am a terrible photographer and I have a lousy camera, so don’t expect too much from these pictures. After yesterday’s disaster, I tried to stay steady and these pictures are less blurry than those from the Lien march.

The crowd gathers at the CKS memorial. This photo covers about 1/3 of the total crowd. Since everyone wants to know, I’d say that the numbers of people in the Ko and Lien parades were fairly close. Both parades took over an hour to walk past a given spot, though the Ko parade may have been a bit more densely packed. The Lien parade claimed 80,000 people, while the Ko parade (inevitably) topped that with an announcement that 200,000 had joined. It is much harder to estimate a parade than a stationary crowd (which you can see all at once). Based on the crowds at the beginning and end of the Ko parade and at the end of the Lien parade as well as watching both march past me, I’m guessing the Lien event may have had as many as 50,000 people take part in some part of the day’s activities, and the Ko parade may have had 75,000. Remember, I’m a killjoy, and my numbers are always lower than everyone else’s. Also remember, that’s still a hell of a lot of people and a very successful political event.

The nutcracker and a tiger stand in front of the main gate, with the CKS Temple looming in the background. Why the nutcracker and a tiger? Surely you can come up with something more unexpected than that.

Yes, yes. Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus. Now that makes perfect sense.

Edit: A commenter points out that this is actually Mother Teresa and George Mackay.  I thought it looked like Mother Teresa, but I was confused by the baby. Also, I confess I have no idea what George Mackay looked like.

Hong Kongers support Taiwan. I saw a few yellow umbrellas and other references to Hong Kong.

Taiwanese are not Chinese. One side, one country. There wasn’t any official platform from the campaign. Everyone brought their own appeals. Some people marched carrying ROC flags. This group is from the independence wing of the political spectrum, but they were by no means the dominant voice. There was probably less hard-core Taiwanese nationalism today than there was hard-core Chinese nationalism at yesterday’s Lien parade.

The Ko ladies group gets their parasols ready for the parade. The Lien campaign is making quite an issue of Ko’s attitudes toward women, so it is very helpful for Ko to have a visible and prominent women’s group supporting him.

I love this photo. The kid is wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, but he doesn’t really need to be anonymous today, so it’s on the back of his head. The I-Pad is more interesting than the revolution today. Still, the Sunflowers have had a strong influence on the Ko campaign, and there were a lot of young people at today’s parade.

Ko’s campaign manager, Yao Wen-chih, stopped for a few minutes right in front of us. Everyone wanted to take a picture with him. This is just about as close to being a rock star as a political scientist can ever get.

Edit: Commenter pohao points out that this is Yao Li-ming 姚立明, not Yao Wen-chih 姚文智. Oops. Thanks for the correction.

Every parade needs a marching band or five. This one only had one, but at least they had a color guard to go along with it.

After Mary, Joseph, and the nutcracker, here’s a more conventional dragon float.

I took a lot of pictures of balloons, people dressed in costumes, signs and so on because they are colorful. However, most of the marchers were just normal people happily joining along.

Above, I said that the Ko campaign didn’t really have a slogan or a theme. That’s not quite true. The main theme was inclusiveness. This was symbolized in part by their many colors of flags. They had eight differently colored flags with identical messages (#hugforTaipei). Many people collected one of each and marched with a rainbow of colored flags in their hands. These people are marching with blue flags — that’s the KMT’s color!

The political scientist in me is a little disconcerted by this emphasis on unity. Unity and harmony are often the slogans of dictators. Democracy requires a bit of division to work. I suppose we in Taiwan are not really in any danger of not enough division though.

A blow-up god rides on a flatbed truck. The campaign had eight of these trucks, one for each of the color groups. Each group represented both a geographical area of the city and a theme, such as youth or creativity.

Here on the Nangang District truck, someone wears the Nangang Exhibition Center on his head.

The view is better from up here.

A lot of signs were professionally printed, but a surprisingly large number were handmade.

Ko’s campaign is committed to the idea of i-voting. This may come from the Sunflower influence and the idea that the internet can coordinate preferences. It may also come from the Ko campaign’s commitment to bottom-up politics. Probably both. Personally (and professionally), I think internet voting is a terrible idea and I hope it doesn’t catch on.

Maybe someone should have told the artists that the Songshan Airport is not in Songshan District. The Sun Yat-sen Memorial is appropriate, though.

The Bubble Soccer King. The Lien campaign actually took issue with this character yesterday. One speaker complained that the Ko campaign was diverted with superficial things like bubble soccer while the China-Korea FTA threatened to marginalize (ie: bubbleize) Taiwan’s economy.

This float celebrates all the wedding photography studios in Zhongshan District. Mrs. Garlic thought that the bride looked a bit like a transvestite and wondered if the Ko campaign was openly supporting gay marriage. She was so disappointed when I told her I thought the bride looked like a woman.

Marchers waving a city council candidate’s flag. I was shocked at how few city council candidates were there. They must have been asked to stay away, perhaps to maintain the idea that the Ko campaign is not simply an extension of the DPP.

Well of course the doctors support Ko P. Or at least the people pretending to be doctors.

This was my favorite float. In Wanhua District, one of the first centers of the Tangwai movement, a fake candidate asks for votes. Frozen Garlic!

Cinderella and her prince walk next to the pumpkin carriage. What happens when the clock strikes midnight? Or 4:00pm on the 29th?

A TSU candidate’s supporters march. The sign on the left says, “a vote for Sean Lien is a vote for the communist party.” Wow, they completely skipped over President Ma. He must feel really unimportant.

Six kilometers is a long way to walk on stilts. Maybe it’s time for a rest. Everyone wanted to take a picture with the girl in Aboriginal dress.

Ko marched almost at the end of the parade. This is great picture of Ko except for the minor problem of the green flag where his face should be. I warned you I’m a lousy photographer.

The Ko P ladies.

We’re going to win! One City, One Family!

Lin rally in Keelung

After the Lien parade and rally finished, I drove to Keelung City to watch a rally for DPP mayoral candidate Lin You-chang 林右昌.  This was a much different, much happier atmosphere.

The crowd was about half the size of Lien’s rally. I estimate there were about 6000 people here. Remember, my estimates are always lower than everyone else’s. I try not to inflate numbers just to make people feel good. That said, 6000 is a lot of people in a small city. You will observe that everyone is wearing an identical white hat. This is usually a sure sign that the crowd was mobilized. In this case, however, they were handing out white caps to everyone, even me. There were a lot of buses, but there were also a ton of scooters and the adjacent parking lot was full of private cars.

Tsai Ing-wen was speaking as I arrived. She’s getting better, but she’s never going to be a rousing orator. It’s amazing how every time I see her, the crowd goes crazy for her introduction, sits patiently through one of her patented lectures, and then goes crazy for her again after she finishes. Fun rallies are great, but even us thrill-seekers understand that a clear political vision is more important (and the “Amens!” can always wait for the next speaker).

The sermon is over, it’s time for hallelujahs! 

Lin gives his speech. Note that his color is red, not green. Lin is making the same sort of cross-party appeals in Keelung that Ko is making in Taipei. Before he spoke, they had a 93 year old military veteran with a thick Shandong accent come up to endorse Lin. Of course, in both Taipei and Keelung, these efforts are driven mostly by the fact that there are not enough green voters to win a majority. They have to reach out to people who don’t already support them.

The entire population of Keelung City crowds onto the stage to support Lin’s candidacy.

I think this might have to be the official photo of my blog. Frozen Garlic!