The 2020 surge in youth turnout

It isn’t often that I am floored by a single chart, but a few months ago I saw a chart that made me question a lot of things I thought I understood about Taiwanese politics. It turns out that youth turnout was sky-high in the 2020 election. I know some people will say, “Well, of course it was. I could have told you that.” Let me caution you. It wasn’t obvious at all. I don’t care about your personal anecdotes. I heard them all in 2016, and youth turnout wasn’t sky-high then. 2020 was qualitatively different from 2016, and it isn’t obvious why.

Here is the chart that shocked me. In 2016 and 2018, turnout for people in their 20s was somewhere around 55-60%. As the age of voters increased so did turnout, peaking at over 70% among voters in their late 60s. There was a huge gap in turnout among young and old voters. 2020 doesn’t look like that at all. More than 70% of young voters turned out. Turnout increased with age, but not nearly as much as in the past. There is an enormous gap between the lines for young voters in 2016 and 2020, and only a small one among older voters.

Before I discuss these numbers in more depth, let me tell you where they come from. This is NOT an ordinary random sample public opinion survey. This is a study by my friend Chuang Wen-jong 莊文忠 and our intellectual godfather Hung Yung-tai 洪永泰 commissioned by the Central Election Commission, which has a legal mandate to investigate any potential gender disparities. It is normally strictly forbidden to look at actual voting records due to Taiwan’s strict privacy laws. However, for this special purpose, the CEC allowed them to look at some voter rolls. They took a sample of precincts, and then they took a sample of voters from each of those selected precincts. For each voter, they collected age, sex, and whether the voter had showed up to vote. (They did not record how each voter voted. That is not recorded on the voter rolls or anywhere else.) They eventually recorded data for over 137,000 eligible voters, and this should be a pretty darn good representative sample. It is reasonable to have doubts about telephone surveys. Some people don’t have telephones, some won’t answer unfamiliar numbers, some will hang up when they realize it is a survey, and some won’t give you honest or accurate responses. None of those are problems here; you will rarely find higher quality data than this. The full report was published on the CEC website. The CEC commissioned similar studies after the 2016 and 2018 elections. I really wish we could go back in time and see data from 2012, which (I think) was a fairly “normal” election, and 2014, immediately after the Sunflower movement. However, voter rolls are destroyed within a few months after each election, so that is impossible.

Since the official purpose of the report is to study gender differences, we should first look at the differences between men and women. Young women have somewhat higher turnout – roughly 5% higher – than young men. The gender gap shrinks with age, until turnout is roughly the same for voters in their late 60s. Among the very old, men vote at higher rates than women. Overall, turnout in the 2020 presidential election was 76.7% for women and 73.2% for men. We saw similar trends in 2016 and 2018.

I don’t have much to say about gender right now. Eventually I’m going to try to figure out if young women vote differently than older women. Newcomers to Taiwanese politics are always shocked that women are about 5% more pro-KMT than men since the much-publicized gender gap in the United States favors the more progressive party. My suspicion is that older women are much more conservative than younger women (ie: the age difference for voting behavior is much larger for women than men), but I don’t have any hard evidence of that right now. This topic will have to wait for another time.

On to youth turnout. Wen-jong has thoughtfully given us a chart comparing each 5-year cohort’s turnout rate in 2016 and 2020. There’s a big gap for voters under 35.

This chart forces me to rethink some basic assumptions about how Taiwanese politics works. For about a decade, lots of people (usually those who sympathize with smaller parties) have enthusiastically been talking about mobilizing young voters. I have generally dismissed such ideas. I have always assumed that trying to mobilize young voters is a fool’s errand. You can dump a lot of resources into these efforts and it will look productive because the politically motivated youth are highly visible. However, overall youth turnout was pretty miserable, so I’ve always thought that expending too much effort on youth votes was a was of resources. Besides, due to declining birth rates, there aren’t actually all that many youth votes to be gained. Much better to focus your energy on the more numerous older voters who might actually show up and vote.

However, it turns out that you CAN mobilize young voters. In fact, maybe I’ve gotten it backwards. Maybe the way to think about it is that older voters will reliably show up in all sorts of elections, whereas younger voters might vote or they might stay home. If that’s the case, the rational thing to do might be to focus a disproportional amount of energy on the youth vote where you might be able to produce a significant difference.

We know that there are more voters in the older age groups, so how much difference does this surge in youth turnout make? As a careful scholar with a narrow mandate, Wen-jong has wisely declined to tackle this topic. I’m a lot more irresponsible, especially here on my blog, so let’s give it a whirl.

The government publishes population data for every month. The number of citizens over 20 is not exactly the same as the number of eligible voters, but it’s close enough. So we have a pretty good estimate for the number of voters in each five-year age group in January 2020. Multiplying these numbers by Wen-jong’s turnout estimates, we can get an estimate of actual votes for each age group in 2016 and 2020. (Since this is a quick and dirty exercise, I didn’t bother to get 2016 estimates for eligible voters even though everyone was four years younger then. It shouldn’t change things too much.)

age	pop	2016 votes	2020 votes	gap
20~24歲	1511939	876925	1099180	222255
25~29歲	1609628	906221	1155713	249492
30~34歲	1591102	916475	1137638	221163
35~39歲	1960348	1152685	1372244	219559
40~44歲	1977952	1234242	1408302	174060
45~49歲	1773496	1172281	1289332	117051
50~54歲	1812826	1292545	1395876	103331
55~59歲	1827740	1363494	1473158	109664
60~64歲	1658994	1282402	1365352	82950
65~69歲	1385806	1110031	1147447	37417
70~74歲	809388	641035	671792	30757
75~79歲	609088	454989	480570	25582
80歲 & up	822702	496089	515011	18922
Total	15724025	12899413	14511615	1612203

According to this, there were about 1.6 million extra votes in 2020 because of higher turnout. These were highly concentrated among the younger voters. In 2016, people 39 and under only made up 29.9% of the electorate, but this group accounted for 56.6% (about 912,000) of the “extra” turnout. As a result, the share of the under 39 group increased to 32.8% of the electorate in 2020. Nearly a million extra young votes seems like a lot.

But let’s go further. We know from quite a bit of survey evidence that young people were much more likely to vote for President Tsai. Let’s try to estimate how all those extra youth votes affected the final election tallies.

I’m going to use some numbers from the Taiwan Election and Democratization post-election survey. Surveys always ask respondents who they voted for, and post-election surveys always find inflated numbers for winners. (This is true every year, regardless of the winner’s party.) This year was no different. In the actual election, Tsai beat Han 57.7% to 38.6%. In the survey data, Tsai’s victory was an enormous 67.2% to 27.9%. To account for this, I inflated Han’s support by a factor of 1.38, Tsai’s by 0.86, and Soong’s by 0.88. This yields estimates for each of the age groups as follows:

Age group	Soong%	Han%	Tsai%
20-29	3.3%	22.7%	74.0%
30-39	6.6%	27.8%	65.5%
40-49	6.1%	39.5%	54.5%
50-59	2.9%	48.1%	49.1%
60&up	3.3%	45.8%	51.0%

Remember, these are fairly dirty estimates suitable only for blogging purposes. A serious methodologist writing a serious academic paper would massage them in several different ways, and they’d certainly all be different (but maybe not by all that much).

What does this imply about the final vote totals? If you take the 2020 votes and the “extra” votes from the previous table and multiply them by the vote shares in this table, you get the following:

Age group	All votes Tsai	All votes Han	All votes gap	“Extra” Tsai	“Extra” Han	“Extra” gap
20-29	1668702	512158	1156544	349110	107149	241961
30-39	1644687	698353	946334	288798	122627	166171
40-49	1469929	1064253	405676	158625	114847	43778
50-59	1407430	1379799	27630	104487	102436	2051
60&up	2129846	1912653	217193	99674	89510	10164
total	8320593	5567216	2753377	1000694	536568	464126

Tsai won every age group, but she didn’t win older voters by very much. In this estimate, Tsai beat Han by 2.7m votes. More than three-fourths of this margin (2.1m) came from voters under 40. If we look at the “extra” votes, the gap is even more stunning. Compared to what would have happened if people had voted at 2016 levels, Tsai’s margin of victory was 464,000 larger. Of this margin, 88% (408,000) came from “extra” voters under 40.

If turnout had been the same in 2020 as it was in 2016, Tsai would still have won. All that extra youth turnout didn’t ultimately affect the outcome. However, the narrative might have been a bit different. Tsai got 56.1% in 2016 and surpassed that with 57.1% in 2020. Without that extra 400,000 votes from high youth turnout, some of the news coverage would have noted that her vote share had slipped a bit. “Tsai wins, but is less popular!” Han might have cracked the psychologically important 40% threshold. It wouldn’t have made THAT much of a difference, though. After all, it was a landslide either way.

However, there have been elections in which an extra 400,000 votes would have been crucial. Chen Shui-bian won the 2000 election by just over 300,000 votes and the 2004 election by under 30,000. Ma Ying-jeou won the 2012 election by a fairly comfortable 800,000 votes, though one can imagine the narrative would have been significantly different if that margin had been cut in half.

The extra youth turnout didn’t end up making that much of a difference in the presidential election, but what about the legislative election? I know there will be some readers who want to count all those extra 400,000 votes as mobilization triumphs for the New Power Party, Taiwan People’s Party, or some other small party. Let me remind you that there were plenty of small parties around in 2016. My guess is that a disproportionate number of these newly mobilized youth votes supported small parties, but it was probably less than half of the total. I suppose I could use the TEDS party vote estimates the same way I used the presidential estimates, but I’m not that brave. I can swallow a 3% error for an estimate of 55%; it’s a lot harder to feel good about a 3% error for an estimate of 6%.

Anyway, the election outcome wasn’t decided by the party list seats. Legislative outcomes turn on the 73 single seat districts. In this election, the DPP-led coalition won a legislative majority by winning 50 of the 73 SSDs. So how many of those did the green side win because of higher youth turnout?

It’s hard to tell, but let’s do some really shaky calculations. Dividing the “extra” gap by 73, higher turnout produced an advantage of just under 6000 votes for each legislative district. However, that is for the presidential election. It is reasonable to think that a fairly high number of young voters cast their legislative district vote for a small party rather than for one of the two main candidates. I’m going to assume that any green candidate in a normal sized district (ie: not tiny Penghu) who won by less than 4000 votes owes their seat to the surge in youth turnout. Here’s the list:

Lai Pin-yu (New Taipei 12, won by 2780 votes)

I was surprised to find that there weren’t more tight races; I had assumed there would be three or four of these districts. The blue side won a couple of tight races, but the green side didn’t have many squeakers this time. There were a few other districts in which the race might have been close enough if ALL the extra youth votes went to the green candidate.

Huang Hsiu-fang (Changhua 2, won by 4836 votes)

Chuang Ching-cheng (Taichung 5, won by 5272 votes)

Freddy Lim (Taipei 5, won by 5416 votes)

Chiang Yung-chang (New Taipei 8, won by 5597 votes)

Kao Chia-yu (Taipei 4, won by 6706 votes)

Of these, Chuang Ching-cheng and Kao Chia-yu might have been the most vulnerable. Both of them ran in very large districts, with almost 100,000 more valid votes than some of the smaller districts (such as Huang Hsiu-fang’s, Lai Pin-yu’s and Freddy Lim’s districts). There were presumably a higher number of “extra” youth votes in Chuang and Kao’s districts, and I think it is plausible that the surge in youth turnout changed the outcome in these two districts.

In the end, the surge in youth turnout probably didn’t fundamentally alter the election outcome. It was, after all, a landslide. However, in a different year with a much closer election, it absolutely could have been decisive. I will never again dismiss efforts to increase youth turnout.

(Caveat: The number of young voters is about to dramatically decrease. There were 1.51m people in the 20-24 age cohort. There were 1.25m in the 15-19 age cohort and 1.01m in the 10-14 age cohort.)

Presidential campaign accounts

A few days ago, the Liberty Times published a story about the financial accounts for the Tsai and Han presidential campaigns. I rarely talk about the role of money in politics because we generally don’t have very good data to look at. This is real data, so maybe it’s worth a quick glance.

However, before I talk about the actual data, let’s quickly note that there are limits to these data. These data come from the Control Yuan, which collects data on political donations based on legal requirements established in various versions of the so-called “Sunshine Laws.” Unfortunately, there are lots of shady spots in the Sunshine Laws, so you can’t expect that these data are the full story. There is not really any penalty for misreporting. If someone shows evidence that a politician has misreported, the politician can simply file a new, accurate report within a certain period of time. Moreover, these reports only cover the accounts of the Tsai and Han campaigns, narrowly construed. They don’t cover all the spending of other organizations, such as the DPP and KMT, various legislative candidates who helped out, or outside supporting groups, such as the Friends of Tsai Ing-wen (小英之友). Finally and most importantly, it isn’t clear to me what the time period is. A quick glance at the Control Yuan website seems to indicate that most of these data start from Sept 1, 2019. Of course, by Sept 1, both campaigns had been in full swing for seven or eight months. So, these data are by no means the full story. Still, they are at least part of the story. And since I don’t think contemporary presidential campaigns are like, say, legislative campaigns from the early 1990s in which as much as 90% of the actual expenses were illegal (read: vote-buying) and off-the-books, these are probably not completely worthless data.

 

[A quick note on currency and numbers. Even after all these years, my brain still doesn’t process large numbers in NT dollars very well. This has something to do with the basic difference between English numbers, which are based on three zeroes (thousands, millions, billions, trillions) and Chinese numbers, which are based on four zeroes (ten thousands 萬, hundred millions 億, trillions 兆). I instinctively understand small numbers, since I live with those in my everyday life. After a brief experience house hunting in Taipei several years ago, numbers up to tens of millions 千萬 also make sense to me. But once you start to get in to the hundred millions 億 and above, my eyes glaze over and I need to start converting into US dollars for anything to make sense. So I’ll give you the data in both NTD and USD, but I’m going to discuss everything in terms of USD.]

 

So how much does it cost to run a presidential campaign? Tsai’s reported budget is roughly USD 20 million, while Han’s is roughly USD 15 million. As noted above, this doesn’t cover the entire campaign, but it probably covers most of the last four months, when the campaign expenses were probably at their highest. My very rough and uneducated guess is that the total cost for the entire campaign (starting at the beginning of 2019) was probably about three times these amounts. But I could be way off with that guess, so don’t quote me on it. That’s real money, but a hell of a lot less than American presidential candidates are burning though, even considering the difference in population size.

 

Liberty Times broke down both the revenues and expenses into several categories. Let’s look at donations first. In NTD, they are as follows:

 

Tsai Ing-wen (DPP)	Revenues (NTD)	Han Kuo-yu (KMT)
338,148,598	Individuals	371,129,494
160,569,287	For-profit businesses	45,263,389
14,500	Political parties	6,000,000
6,442,000	NGOs	1,230,400
59,565,732	Anonymous sources	32,676,370
21,512	Other	11,170
564,761,629	Total revenues	456,310,823

 

Divide the numbers by 30 to convert to USD, and you get the following:

 

Tsai Ing-wen (DPP)	Revenues (USD)	Han Kuo-yu (KMT)
11,271,620	Individuals	12,370,983
5,352,310	For-profit businesses	1,508,780
483	Political parties	200,000
214,733	NGOs	41,013
1,985,524	Anonymous sources	1,089,212
717	Other	372
18,825,388	Total revenues	15,210,361

 

The two candidates got roughly the same amount from individual donations, but Tsai got significantly more from private enterprises. This latter gap is both entirely predictable and simultaneously a bit surprising. On the one hand, businesses want to buy influence, so they always donate more heavily to candidates who look likely to win (and will be in position to make decisions). Since Tsai was clearly leading by September, it isn’t surprising that businesses bet on her. On the other hand, businesses have traditionally favored the KMT. This is especially true for all those businesses that have operations in China. They want traditionally want a government who will help them access the China market, and some of them have to openly support the One China candidate in order to satisfy pressures from within China. So it’s a little surprising to me that all those Taishang didn’t donate more than USD 1.5 million to the Han campaign, just a public relations ploy to their Chinese associates.

The fact that Han actually got a bit more than Tsai in individual donations is also striking, given that Han was trailing in the polls. We heard stories all year about the fervent Han fans, and this might be a reflection of that die-hard support.

 

What about the expenditures? Here are the data in NTD and USD. Note that I have translated 宣傳  as “messaging.” Sometimes this term gets translated as “propaganda,” which has always made it sound somewhat Soviet to me. Other possibilities, such as “advertising” or “communications” don’t quite seem to capture the broadness of this category.

 

Tsai Ing-wen (DPP)	Expenditures (NTD)	Han Kuo-yu (KMT)
325,861,233	Messaging	381,286,374
101,796,817	Events	23,511,551
67,913,244	Personnel	6,388,387
6,590,742	Transportation	3,401,994
29,209,856	Rent and office	932,371
57,524,974	Other	10,655,529
588,896,866	Total	426,176,206

 

 

Tsai Ing-wen (DPP)	Expenditures (USD)	Han Kuo-yu (KMT)
10,862,041	Messaging	12,709,546
3,393,227	Events	783,718
2,263,775	Personnel	212,946
219,691	Transportation	113,400
973,662	Rent and office	31,079
1,917,499	Other	355,184
19,629,896	Total	14,205,874

 

Both campaigns spent more on messaging than any other category. However, while Tsai spent about half of her budget on messaging, Han reported spending nearly 90% of his money on this category.

The media stories were all about how the campaigns spent money to appear on new media. They had a field day breathlessly telling us that Han spent two and a half times as much as Tsai for his appearance on the Nite Nite Show. I guess I’m just not that interested by that little story. I’d like to know how much they spent on You Tube shows, Facebook, Line, traditional media, and so forth. But we don’t have that data here.

Han reports spending USD 1.5 million on everything else. This seems a bit unlikely to me. I will believe that he didn’t spend anything on renting out campaign offices, but only if you tell me that people donated space for little or no cost. Of course, that should be counted at market rates (for both donations and expenses), but this is one of those shady spots in the Sunshine Laws.

The gap in personnel costs is stunning. Tsai reports spending ten times as much as Han on staff! I would be willing to believe that Tsai ran a fully staffed and professional (read: expensive) campaign while Han had to make do with a relatively amateur operation, but this difference is astonishing. After all, the KMT has ample experience running real campaigns; they should have minimum standards for staffing.

The gap on events, where Tsai reported about four times more spending, seems more reasonable to me. We all remember Han’s big, spectacular events. However, as someone who spent the campaign looking for events to attend, it was my clear impression that the Tsai campaign put on a lot more events. A lot of them were smaller, but those all cost money. She was doing several events nearly every day, while he seemed to drop off the campaign trail for two or three days at a time. This also explains the gap in transportation expenses.

 

Several times over the past few years, I have thought about how the KMT and DPP seemed to have switched roles. These expenditure reports are another example. 25 years ago, the DPP would have been running the shoestring campaign with no professional staff, no fancy offices, and spending everything they could on their message. The KMT was the one with all those overhead costs. I don’t think the DPP has gotten to the old KMT levels of unproductive bureaucratic bloat, but these numbers suggest that they are now the ones running the big, slick, professional operation.

Reflections on the legislative election: regions, urbanization, and split-ticket voting

Everyone is focusing on the presidential results. Well, of course they are. The presidential results are important.

But just looking at the presidential results is deceptive in a few ways. First, Tsai won by 18%, which is a huge margin. As we’ll see, the DPP’s actual political foundation is not nearly that much bigger than the KMT’s. Second, the presidential vote gives the impression of stability. Tsai’s vote in 2020 was geographically very similar to that in 2016. She was a point better in some areas, a point worse in others, but overall it was pretty similar. The legislative results were a lot more turbulent. Third, Tsai’s vote looks like a solid block of 57.1% green voters. The legislative results make that coalition look much more fragmented and tenuous. There was a LOT of split-ticket voting this time. Fourth, the legislative results reveal just what a terrible candidate Han Kuo-yu was.

 

Let’s start by giving the official party results. This is the kind of data you might have seen in the newspapers. (Hint: This is not the right way to look at election results.) Note also: the nominal tier includes both the 73 single seat districts and the two indigenous districts.

	Nominal	Nominal	List	List	Prez	Prez
	votes	%	votes	%	votes	%
DPP	6383783	45.1%	4811241	34.0%	8170231	57.1%
KMT	5761995	40.7%	4723504	33.4%	5522119	38.6%
TPP	264478	1.9%	1588806	11.2%
NPP	141952	1.0%	1098100	7.8%
Statebuilding	141503	1.0%	447286	3.2%
Congress	81508	0.6%	40,331	0.3%
PFP	60614	0.4%	518921	3.7%	608590	4.3%
Green	39387	0.3%	341465	2.4%
other parties	190349	1.3%	590484	4.2%
independents	1086463	7.7%	4811241	34.0%
total	14152032		14160138		14300940

 

According to this, the DPP only beat the KMT by 4.4% in the nominal tier. It was close, but not that close. Remember, there were a few DPP candidates who ran as independents (like Su Chen-ching in Pingtung 2). The KMT had a couple as well. Also, if we are going to look at the broad balance of power, shouldn’t we think about all the minor parties as well? Here’s a second table looking at the big camps.

	Nominal	Nominal	List	List	Prez	Prez
	votes	%	votes	%	votes	%
All blue	6103580	43.1%	5422764	38.3%	6130709	42.9%
All green	7135019	50.4%	6921468	48.9%	8170231	57.1%
All white	325663	2.3%	1588806	11.2%
No camp	587770	4.2%	227100	1.6%

The blue camp includes the KMT, PFP, New, CUPP, and a couple independents (Li Weng Yueh-e [New Taipei 3], Lin Kuo-ching [Chiayi 2], Fu Kun-chi [Hualien], Kao Chin Su-mei [mountain indigenous]). The green camp includes the DPP, NPP, Statebuilding, Green, Taiwan Action, Formosa Alliance, and various independents (Freddy Lim [Taipei 5], Hung Tzu-yung [Taichung 3], Su Chen-ching [Pintung 2], Chao Cheng-yu [Taoyuan 6]). The white camp is the TPP plus two independents, Hsu Li-hsin [Taipei 5] and Lee Chin-ying [New Taipei 10]. I didn’t know what to do with Congress Party, since they come from the blue side but their leader endorsed Tsai, so I put them in the no camp bloc.

This grouping is not meant to imply that that these blocs are one team or that they will work together. Rather, the idea is that they draw from the same broad set of voters. For example, I’m not sure we will still consider the NPP as part of the green camp four years from now, but for right now, I think they best fit in that big pool of voters.

Looking at it this way, the green camp beats the blue camp by 7.3% in the nominal vote and 10.6% in the list vote. This is a much better indication of where the country is than the presidential results or the official party totals. The presidential results make the blue side look far too weak because (a) Han Kuo-yu was a disaster and drove every wavering voter away and (b) the white camp is absent.

 

Before moving on, let’s linger a bit on the TPP. This table says the white camp got 2.3% of the district vote, which looks pretty inconsequential. However, they didn’t run in many districts. Moreover, wherever they ran, they were not one of the two main candidates. It’s really hard to be the third candidate in a plurality race. Nevertheless, they did amazingly well. Look at this list of how white camp candidates performed.

district	name	votes	%
Taipei 3	何景榮	5,730	2.6
Taitung	陳允萍	3,527	4.5
Tainan 1	顏耀星	8,793	4.9
Kaohsiung 3	莊貽量	12,099	5.2
Taichung 4	張渝江	13,434	5.7
Kaohsiung 8	敖博勝	14,043	6.0
Taipei 8	張幸松	12,111	6.3
Kaohsiung 1	羅鼎城	10,661	6.5
Taichung 5	謝文卿	18,768	7.3
Taichung 3	張睿倉	14,700	7.5
Kaohsiung 5	李佳玲	20,336	8.6
Taipei 7	蔡宜芳	17,435	9.5
Taoyuan 1	陳泓維	21,951	9.7
Hsinchu County 2	林碩彥	17,902	11.1
Miaoli 1	朱哲成	16,566	11.1
New Taipei 7	吳達偉	20,579	11.7
New Taipei 3	李旻蔚	35,843	18.2
Taipei 5	徐立信	22,208	12.2
New Taipei 10	李縉穎	38,977	18.8

Every one of them got votes. There was not a single white camp candidate who got completely marginalized. Third parties are not supposed to do this well. And remember, it isn’t the case that all of these are great politicians. Remember that guy I mocked in a previous post for his stance on stray dogs? That guy competed with two extremely famous people (Hung Tzu-yung and Yang Chiung-ying), got nearly 15000 votes, and almost certainly affected the outcome of the Taichung 3 race. There is a clear message here: Mayor Ko can transfer (a good deal of) his support to other people. The white camp is a serious force in Taiwan politics.

 

The New Power Party also had a very strong showing at the district level, though they didn’t nominate nearly as many candidates. Here is their list

district	name	votes	%
New Taipei 10	賴嘉倫	13,563	7.3
New Taipei 1	張衞航	19,641	7.6
Kaohsiung 7	陳惠敏	17,466	7.8
Taoyuan 3	林佳瑋	17,512	8.3
Hsinchu City	高鈺婷	73,770	28.6

Again, their first four candidates did extremely well to get significant numbers of votes as the third candidate in a two-way race. It looks as though the NPP has solid support in society. However, since the NPP didn’t need to nominate ten people to qualify for the party list, it could concentrate on its best candidates. This list might look artificially impressive; it’s possible that the next five NPP candidates would have all been turkeys.

Now look at the fifth candidate. Kao Yu-ting was not a spoiler candidate. She was a major candidate in a true three-way race. This was absolutely shocking to me. I was mildly surprised by candidates like Lee Chin-ying in New Taipei 10 who got nearly 20%. However, Kao Yu-ting was on an entirely different level. The three main candidates in Hsinchu City got 95298, 82011, and 73770 votes. Those numbers are all within spitting distance of each other. When the NPP is that close, the DPP can no longer argue that a vote for the NPP is a wasted vote (or a de-facto vote for the KMT). It’s true that the green camp vote was split and the KMT won a seat that it didn’t deserve. However, it is not obvious that the NPP should have supported the DPP and not the other way around.

 

Compared to past years, there were a lot more significant third candidates in district elections. 15 districts had third candidates getting at least 10%, and 28 more candidates got between 5% and 10%. That is to say, most districts this year had a significant third- party presence. This is new.

The two big parties got 95.7% of the presidential vote, which makes it look as if they absolutely dominate Taiwanese politics. That is misleading. They only got 67.4% of the party list vote, which makes it look as if the party system is quite fragmented. That is also a bit misleading. The truth lies somewhere in between. The two big parties still sit atop the political structure, but their coalitions are a lot less solid than they might appear. This is especially true for the DPP, which succeeded in pulling together a massive presidential coalition from several forces who don’t really all want the same things.

 

Ok, let’s go back to the two big parties in the district elections. The best way to look at how they fared is not to look at either the party labels or the big camp blocs. Rather, the best way to look at them is by looking at who they asked people to vote for in each district. Each big party sponsored (officially or unofficially) one candidate in each seat. How did that go?

Note: I assume that Fu Kun-chi was the actual KMT candidate in Hualien. Someone else was the formal KMT nominee, but the party sent a pretty strong message through its VP candidate that Fu was the real KMT candidate. The only place without a major party candidate was the DPP in Kinmen. Chen Tsang-chiang dropped out of the DPP a few years ago, but I didn’t see any reference to the DPP encouraging people to vote for him this time. [Please comment if you know more about the DPP in Kinmen this time.]

 

So, how did the main green and main blue candidates do?

	votes	%
Main blue candidates	5987296	42.3%
Main green candidates	6892140	48.7%

The spread that really matters, the one that decided who would have power in the legislature, was 6.4%. That is not a small advantage, though it is nowhere near the 18% spread from the presidential election (or 14.2%, if you add Han’s and Soong’s votes together).

[Aside: The green side got 6.89 million votes. That number seems familiar…]

Unlike the gap in the presidential election, the gap between the two big blocs in the legislative races is a lot smaller than in 2016. Four years ago, the main green candidates got 12.3% more than the main blue candidates. This year, that gap was cut nearly in half.

	2016	2020	2016	2020
	Vote%	Vote %	seats	Seats
Main Blue	39.7	42.3	25	27
Main Green	52.0	48.7	54	52

Four years ago, I assumed that things would never again be quite as perfect for the DPP. Even if Tsai was re-elected, it would inevitably be with a reduced margin and a reduced legislative majority, just as happened for President Ma in 2012. It didn’t work out that way in the presidential race because Han Kuo-yu was such a terrible candidate, but it did work out that way in the legislative election.

There is one hitch: the seat shares were nearly unaffected by the dramatically reduced gap in votes. The green side won 54 of the 79 seats with a 12.3% advantage in 2016 and 52 with only a 6.4% advantage in 2020. Why?

Before I answer that, let me editorialize. I kept telling people to stop focusing on the party lists, because the legislative majority would be decided by the districts. That is, in fact, exactly what happened. The DPP did terribly in the party list vote, but that did not cause it to lose its legislative majority. Because it is still the biggest party and the nominal tier is so majoritarian, it managed to win two-thirds of the nominal seats and hold an overall majority.

Geography mattered in this election. Based on polling data, I had speculated that Tsai was a bit better in the north, relative to past performance, and a little worse in most other areas. She was, but it wasn’t a very dramatic shift. The biggest change came in Taoyuan, where she was 3.8% higher than four years ago.

	Tsai 2016	Tsai 2020	change
North	53.4%	55.1%	1.8%
North-central	49.0%	52.2%	3.3%
Central	55.1%	56.3%	1.2%
South-central	65.8%	65.3%	-0.5%
South	63.4%	62.2%	-1.2%
East & islands	47.1%	47.5%	0.4%
national	56.1%	57.1%	1.0%

What’s striking about this is not how much things have changed, but how much things have remained stable. It appears voters decided their presidential vote based on sovereignty, identity, and the other aspects of national-level politics.

However, once they cast their “responsible” vote for the presidency, many of them seem to have expressed somewhat different values with their legislative votes. In the legislative vote, as with the 2018 mayoral votes, people were free to register some unhappiness, try to restrain the DPP’s power, or vote on local or secondary issues.

If the geographic shifts in the presidential vote were mild, those in the legislative nominal tier were not. Again, this looks at the vote for the main green and main blue candidate in each district.

2020	main blue	maingreen	mb%	mg%
north	1855480	2014050	43.8%	47.5%
north-central	968922	909486	45.1%	42.3%
central	1203565	1358526	44.5%	50.2%
south-central	741114	1143779	37.0%	57.1%
south	806146	1167737	36.6%	53.0%
East & islands	233322	246947	40.0%	42.4%
indigenous	178747	51615	67.0%	19.4%
national	5987296	6892140	42.3%	48.7%

Note: These are the traditional regional groupings. North: Taipei, New Taipei, Keelung. North-Central: Taoyuan, Hsinchu, Miaoli. Central: Taichung, Changhua, Nantou. South-central: Yunlin, Chiayi, Tainan. South: Kaohsiung, Pingtung. East & islands: everything else.

Compare this with the data for 2016:

2016	main blue	maingreen	mb%	mg%
north	1537669	1808346	41.5%	48.8%
north-central	771873	774850	43.1%	43.3%
central	1046801	1160655	44.9%	49.8%
south-central	512981	1127577	29.7%	65.3%
south	645211	1149444	34.0%	60.6%
East & islands	174188	257415	35.5%	52.5%
indigenous	129300	33710	62.3%	16.2%
national	4818023	6311997	39.7%	52.0%

Let’s compare the change in the edge that the green camp holds over the blue camp in each area.

	2016 (G-B)	2020 (G-B)	change
north	7.3%	3.7%	-3.6%
north-central	0.2%	-2.8%	-2.9%
central	4.9%	5.7%	0.8%
south-central	35.6%	20.1%	-15.5%
south	26.6%	16.4%	-10.1%
East & islands	17.0%	2.3%	-14.6%
indigenous	-46.1%	-47.7%	-1.6%
national	12.3%	6.4%	-5.9%

Nationally, the green camp lost 5.9%, compared to 2016. However, they didn’t lose anything in central Taiwan, only had small losses in northern Taiwan, and they had massive losses in southern Taiwan.

Fortunately for the DPP, they suffered losses in areas that, because they had such a large cushion, they could afford to absorb some losses. Even with double digit losses throughout the south, the DPP still swept all 21 southern seats.

	2016	2020	2016	2020
	Blue seats	Blue seats	Green seats	Green seats
north	7	7	14	14
north-central	5	8	5	3
central	6	5	8	9
south-central	0	0	10	11
south	0	0	12	10
East & islands	2	3	4	3
indigenous	5	4	1	2
national	25	27	54	52

You might notice that the green camp went from being even in North-central (+0.2%) to slightly worse than the blue camp (-2.8%). They were right at the tipping point, where they could not afford losses, and, not coincidentally, the north-central region was where the green camp lost the most ground in terms of seats. It’s also pretty remarkable that the green camp maintained a 14 to 7 advantage in the north, even though their lead was much smaller this time. Several races could have easily gone the other way.

 

In addition to the dramatic losses the DPP suffered in southern and eastern Taiwan, there was also an urban/rural pattern. The DPP lost a lot of ground in rural areas.

I divided Taiwan into three big categories, very urban, suburban, and rural. The urban category includes districts in the core areas of major cities, and most of them have population densities of over 10,000 people per km2. Some examples are New Taipei 6, Taichung 4, Chiayi City, and Kaohsiung 6. The suburban areas are usually thought of as part of the city, but they are just a little further out. Examples are New Taipei 10, Taichung 7, Taoyuan 1, Changhua 2, and Tainan 6. Rural areas generally only have smaller towns (such is the definition of rural in dense, dense Taiwan). Examples include Miaoli 1, Changhua 4, Tainan 1, Kaohsiung 2, and Yilan. This is a quick and dirty classification; there are no hard rules for these choices. It is entirely subjective. You’ll have to trust that it is mostly right. Anyway, the patterns that I’m going to show you probably don’t change much if you insist on moving Pingtung 1 from category 2 to category 3, for example.

In 2016, the green camp did very well in the most rural areas.

2016	main blue	maingreen	mb%	mg%
most rural	1277007	1757475	38.8%	53.4%
suburban	1474932	1953120	39.6%	52.5%
most urban	2066084	2601402	40.2%	50.6%

In 2020, not so much.

2020	main blue	maingreen	mb%	mg%
most rural	1636532	1724987	44.6%	47.0%
suburban	1909851	2324929	41.3%	50.3%
most urban	2440913	2842224	41.7%	48.5%

Here are the gaps and the change:

	2016 (G-B)	2020 (G-B)	change
most rural	14.6%	2.4%	-12.2%
suburban	12.8%	9.0%	-3.9%
most urban	10.4%	6.8%	-3.6%

 

Of course, there is a lot of overlap between rural and south/south-central/east. I don’t have the energy right now to look into which factor is really the dominant one. I suspect they both matter.

Why did the DPP suffer such enormous losses in rural areas and in the south and east? I can think of several possibilities. First, this could be a protest about regional economic inequality. Second, this could be a backlash against same-sex marriage (and other progressive values) by the more conservative rural population. Third, it could have something to do with leadership styles, with Tsai being more of a Taipei personality and Han being a less suave, urbane type of guy.

 

There are two points that I want to close on. First, I want to reiterate the point I have been making throughout. The DPP coalition does not look nearly as solid this time as it did four years ago. This time, there are far more people who split their tickets, voting for Tsai but not the legislative candidates or parties endorsed by her.

Second, Han Kuo-yu severely underperformed. There were a lot more voters out there who were open to voting for the blue camp, but Han could not soak them up. To put it bluntly, Han was a drag on the ticket. He certainly did not pull any legislators to victory, and he probably dragged some down to defeat. He probably played a role in pushing some potential blue voters over to PFP or TPP legislative candidates. At any rate, he was demonstrably less popular than the rest of the party.

Frozen Garlic in the New York Times

I didn’t post nearly as much on this blog as I expected to last week. This is one of the reasons.

Quick reactions

Almost all the votes are counted, but I haven’t really started digging into things yet. These are very, very immediate reactions, so they are probably deeply flawed.

 

When Tsai and the DPP swept into office four years ago, I assumed that their tidal wave was a unique event. Everything had lined up just right, and they would never be able to match those conditions. Just as Ma couldn’t quite match the 2008 wave in 2012, even if Tsai were to win re-election, her vote would inevitably be lower.

Well, she increased her vote share. In perspective, that seems an enormous surprise. Moreover, she increased her vote total by over a million votes. Four years ago, turnout was low (67%), and many KMT figures groused that the KMT had simply failed to turn out all its supporters. That reasoning won’t work this time. Turnout was much higher. Not everything is final, but it is at least 74.1% plus a bit more for invalid votes. Probably the final figure will be about 74.5%. That is the highest turnout we have had in years. (I can’t check because the CEC elections database of historical results is down, but I think this might be the highest since 2004.)

This is a humiliating result for Han Kuo-yu. He ended up being a drag on the KMT, not an asset.

I can’t be sure yet, but it looks as if Han Kuo-yu ran quite a bit behind most KMT legislative candidates, while Tsai Ing-wen ran considerably ahead of most DPP candidates. In other words, Han was dragging his side down, while Tsai was dragging some to victory. I think the KMT district candidates might have gotten more votes than four years ago. Legislative victory margins for the DPP seemed quite a bit smaller this time throughout the south. Tsai’s margins over Han, in contrast, looked about the same in the south (but a bit larger in the north).

 

 

There were several surprising legislative results. Since I specifically wrote that Lai Pin-yu (New Taipei 12) had torpedoed her chances of victory by wearing a cosplay costume in a previous post, let me take this opportunity to publicly acknowledge that I don’t know anything about anything. Hsu Shu-hua (Nantou 2) also dressed up in a costume on election eve, and she also won. I guess now cosplay is a good electoral strategy?!?

Everyone is paying attention to races like Taipei 3 (The Wayne and Enoch Show) and Taichung 2 (Chen Po-wei!). Some results you might have paid less attention to include the DPP winning a mountain indigenous seat, a historical breakthrough for them. Bi-khim Hsiao lost her race in Hualien, which I expected. The significance of this is that she is now free to assume an important spot in the central government (Foreign Minister?) and take a prominent place in President Tsai’s “squad.” I told several people to keep their eyes on Changhua 3, since that was the most likely place (conservative, rural central coast) for a backlash against the same-sex marriage. The KMT did indeed win that race, though there were certainly unique local factors that might have also contributed. I did not expect the DPP to lose New Taipei 1, but the biggest shock was in Taichung 5. A few months ago, I watched the DPP candidate’s event for opening his campaign on YouTube. It looked like amateur hour and a sure loser.

Wayne Chiang’s Taipei mayoral campaign starts tomorrow. Newly elected DPP legislator Kao Chia-yu might think about taking a run at it too.

 

According to my unofficial count, 46 of the 113 legislators are women. For you those of you who don’t have a calculator app on your phone, that’s 40.7%. [edit: The CEC says it is 47 women (41.6%). I can’t count.] The standard source for women in parliaments doesn’t include Taiwan because … you can guess why. But if it did, Taiwan would slot in at number 15 worldwide. Of course, I’m inclined to ignore a few countries on this list, since Rwanda and Cuba aren’t exactly liberal democracies. I’d prefer to point out that Taiwan is basically at Finland’s level, with over 40% female legislators and a female chief executive. Finland is great!! (This comparison is dedicated to Bruce Jacobs.)

 

Finally, I’d like to point out that, in spite of everyone insisting that the polls must be wrong because they FELT wrong, the polls were basically right. In my final weighted average, Han trailed by 27%. However, Soong was polling at 7% and only got 4%, so strategic voting shifted about 3% from Soong to Han, which isn’t shocking. And those of us who insisted that we shouldn’t throw out all the polls just because Han asked us to estimated that the effect of Han’s attack on polls could be accounted for by subtracting 3% from Tsai and adding it to Han. That gets you to – viola!!! – an 18% gap. That might be too convenient, but the larger point was that the polls were in the right neighborhood. The race certainly hadn’t closed to within 5%, as some people decided in their alternate realities. For everyone who insisted on looking at the underground betting odds, and breathlessly reported that you had heard about a local bookie setting the odds at Han -500,000 votes, I hope you bet on Tsai. She covered all the spreads that supposedly existed. I wonder if all those people who were spouting off about the wisdom of underground bookies will be talking about why the odds were so wrong on tomorrow’s talk shows.

 

As you can probably tell, I’m a bit loopy from exhaustion, so I had best stop here. If your side won, go and celebrate a bit. If your side lost, feel free to curse a bit. Either way, isn’t it wonderful that this election was held peacefully and smoothly, that the losers displayed a commitment to democracy by graciously conceding, and that there are no election disputes this year. Democracy is more about the process than about the outcome, and today the process was flawless.

Presidential polls on the eve of the polling blackout

Today, Dec 31, is the last day that polls can be published before the ten-day blackout period starts. A couple last polls straggled in this morning, so I can now present the final weighted poll chart for this year’s election. (For methodology, please refer to the original post.)

This is an astonishing chart. All year long, Tsai Ing-wen’s fortunes have steadily improved while Han’s continually eroded. There was no single event that suddenly transformed the election; it happened bit by bit. While there was no single day that felt completely different from the day before, the race at the end of the year is completely different from at the beginning of the year. My chart only goes back to May, when we started to get a steady enough flow of polls that I could put together a daily average. However, if you look at individual pollsters with longer data series, you can see that the race had already started to change by May. In February, Tsai was much further behind. Here are the data series for the two most reputable pollsters this year, TVBS and Formosa. TVBS has a consistent blue bias, while Formosa tilts a bit toward the green side. Both show the same basic picture: Han starts out with a big lead, which slowly turns into a big deficit.  The “golden cross,” the point at which Tsai overtakes Han, is much earlier in the Formosa chart, but that is to be expected given the partisan skew of the two polls.

Do different types of people have different preferences? One problem with looking at demographic groups in normal polls is that the sample sizes are too small, so the numbers that pundits love to talk about (Han’s support in Hualien among women aged 30-39 has skyrocketed!!) are actually just random noise. In order to say anything reasonable, we need bigger sample sizes. Formosa conducted seven polls from mid-October through late December. Instead of looking at individual poll results, I have taken the average of these seven polls for various subgroups. This should yield a far more reliable look at the differences across categories.

Let’s start with sex. There has been a gender gap in Taiwan for decades. Men are more likely to support the DPP, while women are more likely to support the KMT. This gender gap surprises many outsiders, especially Americans, who assume that women should support the progressive side in Taiwan as they do in the USA. It doesn’t work that way, even with a woman leading the ticket. Tsai did better among men than among women both in 2012 and 2016, and the same thing will happen again in 2020.

We don’t know exactly why this gender gap exists. Most people think it reflects women’s desire for stability and safety, leading them to support the party promising it can avoid war with China. Now that questions concerning sexuality and personal autonomy, such as same-sex marriage and limiting abortions, as slowly entering Taiwanese politics, I’m curious to see if the gender gap will be affected, especially among younger or unmarried people.

Age has emerged as a very important variable in the last decade. As recently as 2012, there was not much of an age difference. Now, the gap is dramatic. Among people over 40, Tsai leads Han by 15 to 20 points. Among the 30-39 group, her lead is nearly 30 points. Among the 20 somethings, it is 45 points.

Younger people have strong Taiwanese identities and overwhelmingly dislike the KMT, but that does not imply that they love the DPP. In fact, they have decidedly mixed feeling toward the DPP. They will vote for it if the individual candidate is palatable (as with Tsai), but many would prefer to vote for another party. In non-plurality elections, younger people often look elsewhere.

Tsai leads all education levels by roughly similar amounts. A glance at 2016 pre-election surveys shows similar patterns. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

Region is interesting. Tsai is strongest in the Tainan and Kaohsiung areas, while Han is stronger in Taipei, New Taipei, and Taoyuan. We all know that Taiwan is blue north, green south, so this makes perfect sense.

Uh, wait a second. Did you notice that Tsai is a lot more popular in New Taipei than in Taichung, which are traditionally pretty similar for the DPP. In fact, Tsai is nearly as strong in Taipei and Taoyuan as in Taichung, which is not historically the case.

Let’s directly compare those polling averages to Tsai’s actual votes in 2016. The gap shows that she is doing a bit better in New Taipei and a bit worse in the Taichung area. People like to say that central Taiwan is the traditional bellwether zone; if you win it you will win all of Taiwan. That is correct, but it’s more accurate to expand the bellwether zone to central Taiwan and New Taipei, which historically fall at just about the same point on the partisan divide. However, this year, New Taipei is considerably greener than the Taichung area.

The differences between this year’s polls and the 2016 results are intriguing on the green side, but they are downright stark on the blue side. Compared to Eric Chu, Han is reasonably close to Chu in central, southern, and eastern Taiwan. The Tainan area may be his weakest region in absolute terms, but he is actually polling quite well there compared to the KMT’s past performance. However, northern Taiwan, with nearly half the population, is a disaster. The problem for the KMT is that, unless Han outperforms his polls by a stupendous amount, the swing legislative districts are not likely to be in the south. The DPP should have enough of an advantage there that it can absorb a bit more Han popularity with no effect on the legislative races. However, the north is full of close races, most of which tipped in the DPP’s direction last time. These numbers suggest that it will be very hard for the KMT to win many of those back. Many races in central Taiwan were close four years ago, and this is the only region in which these geographical shifts might help the KMT. Unfortunately for the KMT, there are 30 seats between Hsinchu City and Keelung City in the north, compared to only 14 in central Taiwan.

One key to Tsai’s resurgence is that her approval rating has improved immensely since last year. For the first three years of her presidency, her approval rating experience a long, sad, steady slide. By last year’s local elections, according to many polls, her approval rating was near a paltry 20%. That is not a good way to go to the voters to ask for renewed support, and her party was flogged severely. However, over the course of 2019, Tsai’s approval rating has recovered dramatically. From being over 40% underwater, Tsai now has a net positive approval rating in most polls. This chart is Formosa’s tracking poll, which they have compiled over her entire presidency. I don’t know exactly what the numbers in Nov 2018 — not only the election but also her worst month in this chart — were, but the numbers for Dec 2018 — which was nearly as bad — were 21.5% approve and 67.3% disapprove. Ouch.

Tsai’s political resurgence was not merely a personal triumph. She, her party, and the entire green side of the political spectrum have risen together. Look at trends in party identification. Party ID is measured by a question asking respondents which party they generally support. Party ID has a very close relationship with vote choice, and it is considered one of the most important variables in voting research. The Formosa polls break down Party ID by individual party and also aggregate those results into blue and green camps. In practice, very few people identify with small parties, so blue party ID is almost all KMT party ID and green party ID is almost all DPP party ID. (Voters may support smaller parties, but they are less likely to have a strong, enduring psychological attachment to a particular small party, many of which are relatively new and unknown.) This chart shows blue and green party ID over the past year. There is a gradual increase in the green camp’s popularity from February to November, when it suddenly shoots up considerably. The blue camp’s popularity showed a gradual decline over the entire year. As a result, the green camp went from facing a 7.7% deficit in party ID to enjoying a 17.4% advantage.

Another way to look at this is by breaking the electorate down into different types of groups, based on how they think about the two big parties. The Formosa polls put people into nine different categories, three who prefer the KMT to the DPP, three who prefer the DPP to the KMT, and three who are neutral. You can arrange the KMT and DPP categories spatially, from left to right. However, the three neutral categories don’t have a specific spatial ordering. Some people have positive feelings toward both parties, some people have negative feelings toward both parties, and some people are uninformed and can’t make judgments about either party. These three groups behave in quite different ways. (I described these nine groups in more detail in an earlier post.)

If you look at the distribution of these nine groups over the past year, you can see that the three pro-DPP categories make up a bigger and bigger part of the electorate while the three blue categories have shrunk. If you take the average of the first three surveys (Feb-Apr), 36.3% of the electorate was blue while only 26.4% was green. In the last three surveys, only 27.3% was blue, while a whopping 42.1% were classified as green. A 9.9% disadvantage for the green side early in the year had transformed into a 14.8% advantage late in the year.

We naturally expect the DPP candidate to do well in the pro-DPP groups and poorly in the pro-KMT groups. That is exactly what happened. Tsai only did markedly better in one group, the neutral voters who like both parties equally. With all the other groups, she won roughly the same percentages both early and late in the year. Her gains came almost entirely from expanding the pro-DPP groups rather than by becoming more personally popular.

Han is a different story. He lost some support because his party declined in popularity. However, his slide can’t simply be blamed on the KMT’s collective brand. Compared to his early 2019 polls, Han became significantly less popular within each group. That is, he won less support among die-hard KMT supporters, KMT leaners, people who liked both parties equally, people who dislike both parties equally, and all stripes of pro-DPP voters. He bears a heavy personal responsibility for his failure in the polls.

Since I know you are curious, Soong gets a little bit of support from all nine groups. His best group, not surprisingly, is voters who don’t like either big party. They might like Soong and the PFP, or they might just be casting protest votes against the two big parties. It is worth noting that Soong doesn’t do nearly as well in this category as Ko Wen-je did. Back in the spring and summer, when many people thought Ko was running, he would usually get 50% or more in this category.

 

Well, that’s it folks. No more polling until Jan 12. Enjoy all the groundless speculation about underground gambling odds.

Populism and Han Kuo-yu

How are we to understand Han Kuo-yu? How did he rise from nowhere last year to become one of the central figures of Taiwan’s politics? And how has his popularity fallen so dramatically over the course of this year?

I have been asked versions of this question repeatedly over the past 16 months, and I have never been able to give a comprehensive answer. I could explain pieces of the puzzle, but there were always important parts that didn’t make sense to me. I think I finally have a fuller explanation to offer.

Han Kuo-yu is a populist. His rise to prominence was based on the success of this populist appeal, and his decline from that peak is a result of events and opponents eroding the power of that populist message. Populism is the frame through which to understand almost everything about the Han Kuo-yu phenomenon of the past year and a half.

 

What is populism?

 

Saying Han is a populist isn’t very helpful if we don’t know what populism is. Unfortunately, the word populism is used both in public discussion and in the academic literature to refer to a frightening variety of phenomena. At a recent workshop I attended on populism, the papers cited literature that used the term to mean:

• Anti-establishment (referring to party leaders)
• Anti-establishment (referring to social and economic elites)
• Charismatic mobilization
• Direct communication with followers
• Anti-pluralism
• Pushes unrealistic but popular economic redistribution
• Anti-immigrant
• Anti-minority
• Claims to represent the general will
• A style of relationship between a leader and followers characterized by sincerity
• A focus on unification or independence (in Taiwan)
• an “all-people’s” cabinet (referring to President Chen’s first cabinet)

A term that means so many things is nearly useless. What we need is a better theoretical definition. Good definitions cut away all the extraneous ideas. Effectively, they tell you, “Don’t pay any attention to all that other stuff. Focus on this. This is the crucial feature, and everything else either flows from this part or it wasn’t important in the first place.” Fortunately, dear reader, someone has given us a better definition. At that recent workshop, Jans-Werner Mueller, a political theorist at Princeton, gave the keynote speech, and his talk was enormously clarifying for me. The definition of populism that I provide in this post is taken almost directly from Mueller’s talk and his 2016 book. Unfortunately, I can’t provide a link to online versions of either of these, but here is an article he published in 2015 presenting the same conception of populism.

Populism is a way of framing political competition as a moral question. Populists champion the real people, who they see as morally pure and homogenous. Not all the legal citizens are part of the real people, and the populist insists that he alone defines who constitutes the real people. Since the real people are homogenous, there is a clear will of the people. The populist insists that he alone can identify and represent the will of the people. The morally pure will of the people is impeded by a corrupt elite, who are not part of the real people, and the corrupt elite is sometimes allied with a parasitic underclass, who are also not part of the real people. Anyone who challenges the legitimacy of the populist’s definition of the real people or of the popular will is making a moral challenge. This moral challenge is almost always answered in moral terms, by labeling the challenger as corrupt.

Within all those critical ideas, the single most important concept is that of the real people. Not everyone who is a legal citizen is part of the real people. Only some people are part of the real people, and they are the only ones who matter. Who are not part of the real people? As I understand it, populists always point to a corrupt elite that betrays the real people. The leftist version of populism most commonly found in Latin America thus sees the corrupt elite as conspiring with the USA to steal the people’s wealth. The rightist version of populism currently running through the USA and Europe sees the corrupt elite as allied with a parasitic underclass. Trump, Farage, Haider, and Grillo do not see (most) minorities and immigrants as part of the real people. Ultimately, the real people are defined exclusively by the populist himself. Since the populist can say who is part of the real people, he can also define what the real people want. This rests on the assumption that the real people are homogenous. They may not currently be unified, because the corrupt elite is constantly trying to divide them. The populist’s task is thus to unify the real people. As a homogenous bloc, the real people all want the same thing, if only someone will come along and identify that vision for them.

Conceived this way, populism is anti-pluralistic. In a pluralist view, society is composed of many different individuals and groups with different values, different interests, and different goals. There is no such thing as a concrete, identifiable will of the people, since the people do not exist as a singular entity. Policies are not inherently morally legitimate, so citizens are free to oppose them without fear of being accused of betraying the society. Competing policies have to be judged by their empirical results, so pluralism encourages policy debates in which different sides present evidence to demonstrate that a given policy has had or will have a particular desired effect. Populists view these decisions in moral terms. It is not necessary to argue about specific policies, since it is obvious that the government should just do the things that will help the (real) people. All other policy proposals must be motivated by corrupt intentions.

[Note: Not all leftists who want more redistribution or rightists who want less immigration are populists. The critical point is the existence of a homogenous real people in the politician’s rhetoric. For example, Bernie Sanders talks about the 99%, but this is statistically defined rather than notionally defined. He is quite aware that many people in that 99% do not and never will share his values and goals. He is trying to build a coalition from a diverse society that will agree on a (yet to be negotiated) common set of policies rather than to activate an already existing homogenous block of real people who already want those things. Bernie Sanders may want redistribution, he may be charismatic, he may have devoted followers, and he may be anti-establishment, but none of those (superficial) things make him a populist.]

 

Han Kuo-yu’s populist rhetoric

 

“Our country is sick. Our Taiwan is wounded. What happened? Why did the leading country of the four little Asian dragons, after President CCK passed away and left us the Hsinchu Science Park and the Ten Major Construction Projects – how did our country become this way? Our industriousness, our kindheartedness, our diligence, our simple goodness? The rest of the world looks at Taiwan and sees fraudsters and drugs. How do we explain this? … There are now three living ex-presidents, President Lee, President Chen, and President Ma. You were president for over twenty years. What industry did you leave behind for Taiwan? The only industry Taiwan has is in the Hsinchu Science Park!”

–Han, Apr 28, 2017, KMT party chair election policy forum

 

Han Kuo-yu entered the national political fray in 2017 by running for KMT party chair. He was a relative unknown, a former relatively undistinguished legislator who had been out of national politics for fifteen years. At the first policy forum, Han presented himself in clear populist terms. After talking about how prosperous and hopeful the ROC had been when he was young in the 1980s, he talked about how it had stagnated over the past thirty years. The quote above lays down the gauntlet in distinctly moral terms. The people are morally pure, but the country has been corrupted. Presidents Lee, Chen, and Ma have not worked to help the people. That is, the people have been betrayed by the elite. Han implies that moral leaders standing on the people’s side would have created several additional vibrant economic sectors, since that was obviously what Taiwan’s people need.

Han pointedly did not exclude Ma from his list of corrupt elites. The KMT also had a cabal of corrupt elites who have betrayed the people. The people’s interests are not, in Han’s discourse, equal to the KMT’s interests. In fact, Han later states that, as chair, if any DPP mayor did a good job, he would not nominate a KMT candidate to contest the seat and would instead let the good mayor have another term. Here, Han is establishing that he, not the KMT as a collective, will decide who is part of the real people.

 

When he entered the Kaohsiung mayoral race, Han usually told a similar story. Once upon a time, Kaohsiung had been prosperous and vibrant. Kaohsiung had the highest proportion of Mercedes in all of Taiwan, and a bowl of particularly extravagant eel-larvae soup sold for tens of thousands of NT. Kaohsiung had abundant resources hard-working, honest people. Kaohsiung should rightfully be the most prosperous place in Taiwan. However, now many people had to move north for economic reasons, and the city was choking under heavy public debt. The honest people of Kaohsiung, out of gratitude for their contributions to democratization, had given the DPP power for 20 years in Kaohsiung City and 32 years in Kaohsiung County, and the DPP had done nothing for them in return.

Han did not usually directly accuse the DPP government of corruption. On the stump, he sometimes referred to Kaohsiung as a sleeping giant, implying that the DPP governments had simply neglected the people’s needs rather than actively undercutting them. However, corruption was a constant undercurrent in the wider political discourse. By the end of the campaign, there was a constant stream of people murmuring about all the corruption cases that must have piled up during the twenty years of DPP government in Kaohsiung.

According to Han, the good people of Kaohsiung just wanted better daily lives 過好日子. He often stated that Taipei could have all the politics; Kaohsiung just wanted to focus on economics. The prescription was fairly simple: the government should help the people sell their goods to the rest of the world, and Kaohsiung would naturally become a magnet for people everywhere else. Goods go out, people come in 貨出去，人進來. Han even turned his unfamiliarity with Kaohsiung into an advantage. As an outsider, Han did not have intricate local knowledge. No matter. Han packaged himself as a CEO mayor, who would put good people in place and allow them to do what needed to be done. The specific policies were not important; what was important was having leadership dedicated to helping the people (instead of themselves).

How did the DPP react to Han’s message of working for the people? With dirty tricks and mudslinging! In Han’s rhetoric, the DPP campaign was not based on ideas at all. Rather, in order to continue to enjoy their power, they used underhanded and crooked methods to try to delegitimize him. He wanted a clean campaign, but his opponents only knew how to use dirty tricks.

 

 

In this year’s presidential election, Han’s populist rhetoric has been even clearer. He tells the same basic story. Everything was once good, but now it is bad. However, this year his attack on the DPP government is much sharper. Instead of merely insinuating corruption or neglect, he explicitly accuses the Tsai government of corruptly betraying the people.

Here is Han at a rally in Hsinchu County on Dec 7. “The DPP government doesn’t care about the people at all. It’s true. A small cabal of people – among 23 million people, there is a small cabal of people leading the DPP – is full of corruption and rot. They feast and feast. The factions divide the spoils among themselves. When the factions finish dividing the spoils, their underlings divide up their share, and then their underlings take a cut. As long as you are a DPP elite, it doesn’t matter what birth status or background you have, as long as you are one of their people. It doesn’t matter if you have murdered someone, committed arson, or embezzled money, it doesn’t matter. They’ll give you a powerful position all the same. They set these people free on us to engage in corruption, to eat the flesh and drink the blood of Taiwanese people. Now, after three and a half years, all of Taiwan is sick.”

The Han campaign’s focus on the Yang Hui-ju楊蕙如  case fills an important hole in this narrative. The corrupt DPP elite systematically divert government resources toward perpetuating their power. In this case, the KMT charges that the DPP used government resources to fund internet soldiers to attack their political enemies online. Here is a concrete case of how the corrupt DPP elite are stealing the people’s money and using it for their own purposes. No wonder Taiwan is stagnating!

This year, Han has also expanded on his notion of the real people. He has given them a label, shumin (庶民, commoners). In his mayoral campaign, Han often expressed his belonging to this group by talking about how he only needed a bottle of water and a bowl of braised pork on rice (一瓶礦泉水，一碗滷肉飯). Perhaps more importantly, he defined them with another memorable phrase, “Never forget that the world is full of people living bitter lives” (莫忘世上苦人多). The shumin are the people who live, or worry about living, bitter lives. In 2018 and 2019, lots of people can identify with the notion of bitterness, including people angry at the new labor laws, civil servants who have seen their pensions cut, people relying on Chinese tourists, people who think their electricity bill is too high, people who want to drink bubble tea with a disposable straw, people who don’t want to replace their old (polluting) scooter, people who have to breathe dirty air, and people who just think that things should be better. It is worth emphasizing that a lot of people who worry about bitterness, such as retired civil servants, are not poor or marginalized. Even more pointedly, some people worry about the bitterness of being cut off from government patronage flows. The DPP reforms (and rumored future reforms) of the irrigation associations and farmers associations, along with the huge Forward-Looking Infrastructure Package threatened to reroute government patronage projects from one set of people to an entirely different set of people. Being thrown off the gravy train would indeed be bitter. This definition of shumin as people who suffer or fear bitterness feeds back into his notion that that what the shumin want is simply to have better daily lives.

Han has talked about his love for the ROC quite a lot in this year’s presidential campaign than during last year’s mayoral campaign. However, even last year, Han’s most passionate supporters were decked out from head to toe in ROC flag imagery; ROC nationalism has always been a core element of his appeal. How did he communicate this without explicitly talking about it? I think the most powerful message comes from his nostalgia of the CCK era, which he interprets as an era of peace, harmony, stability, and prosperity (as opposed to the contentious era of authoritarian suppression and a frothy bubble economy that others might see). In that era, the virtuous leader implemented good policies for the people that he loved, and the people enjoyed good daily lives. There was only one permissible will of the people – the one prescribed by the regime in which everyone loved the ROC – so nostalgic people like Han could remember that era as having a homogenous, singular general will. This golden era is especially seductive to mainlanders, who enjoyed a privileged status, which was even better since they did not have to acknowledge their privilege. During the CCK era, people were able to concentrate on getting rich, and they did not have to worry about politics. Everything started to go downhill once the Lee Teng-hui presidency started. The population began questioning the ROC, respect for the former privileged classes diminished, the economy slowed down, the newspapers started reporting stories about corruption, and the formerly unified society became divided into perpetually fighting political parties. No wonder people who love the old ROC, the one that existed prior to democratization, flock to Han.

Han has, of course, embraced KMT positions on how to manage relations with China. He is a strong supporter of the 1992 Consensus. However, he comes at it from a slightly different angle than President Ma. Han’s imperative is to do what is best for the shumin so that they can have better daily lives. If what the country needs is to open more markets so that people can sell their goods to the world, he will do whatever it takes to make that happen. China is an important market, so naturally he will take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that Taiwanese businesses have access to that market. In every election, Taiwan always has a few candidates promising to put ideology aside and focus exclusively on economics. What they almost always mean is that they will accept One China, but they don’t want to talk about that with the public. Han is close to this. He will tell you that he wants the 1992 Consensus, but he doesn’t want to talk about the political implications of this decision. In his rhetoric, it is simply a tool to maintain peace and open markets.

 

Unsuccessful and successful attacks on Han’s populism

 

During last year’s mayoral election, Chen Chi-mai, the DPP candidate, chose to largely eschew negative personal attacks on Han. Since Chen was an overwhelming favorite to win the election in deep green Kaohsiung, he might have assumed that he could rely on a positive message to consolidate the green side and not worry at all about what Han was doing.

Chen’s main attack on Han was policy-based. Chen charged that Han didn’t know enough about the details of Kaohsiung politics to be an effective mayor. This attack played right into Han’s populist rhetoric.

In the first mayoral debate, Chen tried to expose Han’s unfamiliarity by asking him how he would renovate two fishing harbors. Han replied that he didn’t need to know those details, just as he didn’t need to know how many fire hydrants there were in the city. As the mayor, he could simply direct a bureaucrat to devise an appropriate plan to renovate the fishing harbors.

Populists don’t feel any need to struggle with the details of plans. Let me use an anecdote from Hungary, where Viktor Orban refused to participate in a policy debate, explaining,

“No policy-specific debates are needed now, the alternatives in front of us are obvious […] I am sure you have seen what happens when a tree falls over a road and many people gather around it. Here you always have two kinds of people. Those who have great ideas how to remove the tree, and share with others their wonderful theories, and give advice. Others simply realize that the best is to start pulling the tree from the road…. [W]e need to understand that for rebuilding the economy it is not theories that are needed but rather thirty robust lads who start working to implement what we all know needs to be done.” (quoted in Mueller 2016, 26).

Han likewise wasn’t interested in policy debates. He would simply order bureaucrats to start doing the obvious things necessary for revitalizing the fishing harbors.

Near the end of the election, KMT chair Wu Den-yi insulted former Kaohsiung mayor Chen Chu, likening her to a “fat sow.” The DPP collectively recoiled in indignation and spent several days defending her honor against this insult. Han even admitted that Wu had stepped over a line. However, bringing Chen Chu into the center of the election was probably advantageous for Han. After all, he was effectively running against her. Far from being a popular incumbent and an asset to Chen Chi-mai’s campaign, Han had recast Chen Chu as a corrupt, ambitious politician who had first neglected the people and then abandoned them as soon as possible in order to take a better position in the central government. She was the personification of the corrupt elite holding back the morally pure people. Unless the Chen Chi-mai team could first undo that reimagination of Chen Chu, it probably didn’t help them to have her squarely in the public eye in the days right before voting.

Chen Chi-mai tried to introduce sovereignty questions into the campaign. Since the Kaohsiung electorate is historically more green than blue, it made sense to try to pull the campaign back to traditional battle lines. Chen thus complained that all of Han’s schemes to strengthen the economy were based on tapping into the China market. This line of attack doesn’t seem to have had much effect, probably because Han was running for a position in local government. As mayor, he simply did not pose much of a threat to national sovereignty since the (DPP) national government would still set the limits for what was and was not permissible. While he openly supported the 1992 Consensus, ECFA, and Free Trade Zones, he wouldn’t be able to unilaterally implement any of those. His promise was merely to go as far as possible within those limits, something that other local governments around Taiwan were already doing. Sovereignty might have altered the outcome, but Chen never found an effective way to introduce it into the election.

 

After seeming so bulletproof last year, why has Han seemed so vulnerable this year? I see three big answers.

First, sovereignty has been effectively introduced into the equation. This was probably inevitable, since how Taiwan relates to China is almost always the biggest and most important question facing Taiwan. If anything, we should marvel at how Han was so effective at keeping this question on the sideline last year. Xi Jinping’s bluster and the protests in Hong Kong have thrust China to the center of political discourse, and this has pulled the lines of partisan battle back toward established patterns (which now favor the DPP). If it hadn’t been Hong Kong, it almost certainly would have been something else. Regardless, Han’s populist wave has crashed against the solid rocks of Taiwan’s robust party politics.

Han aided this process with a couple of own-goals. First, in a trip to Hong Kong in March, he unexpectedly visited the Hong Kong Liaison Office, the unit in charge of overseeing One Country, Two Systems for Beijing in Hong Kong. Second, when the anti-extradition protests in Hong Kong began, he refused to criticize the government, first saying he hadn’t paid any attention and then saying that he hoped stability could be restored. Both of these actions were highly controversial, and they probably cost him quite a bit of support. From a populist perspective, both actions were defensible. Han had defined the real people as only caring about their daily lives. That is, in his conception, shumin don’t care much about political questions such as sovereignty, human rights, or democracy. He was, as promised, doing whatever was necessary to keep the China market open. However, shumin are not actually a monolithic, homogenous block with a single general will. Different people have different values and want different things. Some of his erstwhile supporters cared quite a bit about sovereignty, human rights, and democracy. When those values came into conflict with supporting Han, many of his erstwhile supporters decided that they no longer wanted to be part of Han’s shumin.

Second, Han has not performed well as mayor; he has not taken good care of the shumin. Han came into office with the populist promise that he would do the things necessary to help the people. It hasn’t gone well. Han has been accused of laziness and ineptitude. He is said to sleep until noon and enjoy drinking a bit too much. He has also had a few high-profile failures, particularly in dealing with the Dengue fever outbreak. The accusation wasn’t merely that Dengue fever had hit Kaohsiung, but, more importantly, that Han had failed to act energetically to control it. The city asked for extra budget from the central government to do things like spraying and draining standing water, and the premier responded that the city had not yet even finished using the normal budget for these things. In contrast to Han’s poor record, President Tsai has had a year full of policy triumphs. She has secured a purchase of F-16 fighter jets, the economy is growing faster, swine flu has been kept out of Taiwan, spending on social welfare programs is up, taxes are down, the budget is balanced, infrastructure is being built, and new energy sources are coming on line. At the recent presidential policy forum, after talking about all her achievements, Tsai could tell Han that she was the one who was actually doing things to help shumin, while Han was merely “consuming” them (ie: paying lip service to them and cynically using them for his own purposes).

Third, the DPP has successfully attacked Han as being a fake shumin. Populists don’t always have to be like normal people. Donald Trump’s supporters do not mind that he is a billionaire and they are not. As long as he speaks and works for them, it does not matter that he is decidedly not like them. However, Han has always presented himself as actually being a shumin. His “bottle of mineral water” embodies his normality. At a recent rally, I heard the slogan 庶民選總統，總統選庶民 (shumin choose a president; for president, choose a shumin). He is not merely like them; he is actually one of them.

The DPP has attacked Han’s shumin credentials in two ways. First, they relentlessly attacked Han for breaking his promise to serve a full term as mayor in Kaohsiung. Remember, Han pointed to Chen Chu’s departure from Kaohsiung as evidence of her corruption. She cared more about power than people, so she cynically abandoned the people to pursue more power. She was obviously part of the corrupt cabal and not part of the shumin. This helps to explain why so many former Han supporters felt so betrayed when he agreed to seek the KMT’s nomination for president. He was doing the very thing that he had identified as proof of corruption.

In early November, Han came under an even more direct attack. Reporters uncovered his history of real estate transactions and found that he had bought and sold luxury housing in Taipei. There was an insinuation that he had used political influence to secure financing for the deal. His opponents questioned whether a property speculator who depended on political connections was really a shumin or whether he was actually merely an ordinary corrupt politician.

 

Conclusion

 

Han Kuo-yu’s meteoric career over the past year and a half makes much more sense if we view it through the framework of populism. Han frames politics as a moral choice between himself, the representative of the shumin, and a corrupt elite who control the DPP and sap the country of its vitality. This framework focuses our attention on crucial points, such as his rhetoric around corruption and his seemingly cavalier attitude toward public policy, while instructing us to ignore other aspects that may seem central but are actually secondary, such as his attacks on Filipina workers. It also helps explain why some attack against him have been effective while others have failed miserably.

There are still lots of questions to be answered. Perhaps most pertinently, since populist rhetoric is always present, why did it suddenly start to work in 2018? Why didn’t it work in 1994 or 2009? If you know the answer, the entire world wants to know. By clearly defining what populism is, at least we have a more tractable question.

If Han loses the presidential election, we probably should not take that as proof that populism is unsustainable in Taiwan. Taiwan’s robust party system, constructed on top of a single, dominant, enduring political cleavage, has worked against populism in this case. However, we should not be overconfident that a populist couldn’t take over the DPP and ride its structural advantages to electoral victory. It isn’t hard to imagine a DPP populist constructing “the real people” as everyone who believes in Taiwan nationalism and moving to systematically marginalize everyone else. The best defense against populism is not to merely defeat one populist one time. Rather, fighting populism requires a renewed commitment to pluralism, insisting that it is perfectly normal and legitimate that different people have different values and different goals, that people who disagree with you are not necessarily corrupt or immoral.

Campaign Trail: KMT event in Xizhi

On Sunday evening, Mrs. Garlic and I went to a KMT rally in downtown Xizhi, which is part of New Taipei 12^th District. Technically, my residence is in the next city over, so New Taipei 12 is not my home district. But actually, it is. We do most of our shopping in Xizhi, and we live close enough to this event that we could have walked there. For once, I was on home turf.

New Taipei 12 is really two separate territories. There is Xizhi, and there is everything else. Xizhi, which has about 70% of the voters, is an extension of Taipei City. Xizhi has grown rapidly over the past thirty years, and it has transformed from a discreet small town into the easternmost edge of the Taipei metropolis. The boundary between the two jurisdictions is almost invisible, so many people who technically live in Xizhi actually do most of their noodle-eating in the Nangang or Neihu districts of Taipei City. Almost all of Xizhi’s voters live in dense urban neighborhoods, and, while people are more likely to know their neighbors here than in Taipei, the social networks are not as thick as in more rural areas. The other 30% of New Taipei 12 is, by Taiwan standards, quite rural. There are six townships with fairly small core areas of only a few thousand people each. Politically, relationships matter a lot. Voters in these small towns will split their tickets if they know you personally, so establishing good relations with organizations such as the farmers associations is crucial.

Prior to 2016, New Taipei 12 was blue territory. The incumbent was KMT princeling Lee Ching-hua 李慶華, whose father, Lee Huan 李煥, was one of CCK’s closest proteges and a former premier. The younger Lee was elected in 1992, so by 2016 he was trying to win his ninth term in the legislature. Lee had started out as a KMT member, but he joined the New Party when it was founded in 1993 and was re-elected twice under that label. He had originally been elected in the southern half of Taipei City, but to make room for new people he agreed to relocate to Taipei County, where he concentrated on the military communities of Zhonghe. After the 2000 presidential election, he shifted his allegiance to the PFP and continued to mine the Zhonghe mainlander vote bank through the 2001 and 2004 elections. After electoral reform, he searched his heart and discovered that his true ideals were consistent with the KMT’s, so he returned back to his original party. He wanted to run for the Zhonghe seat, but he lost the KMT nomination for Taipei County 8 to the KMT local faction candidate Chang Ching-chung. As a compromise, the KMT arranged for Lee to take over the Taipei County 12 seat, centered on Xizhi. Under the old system, the areas that became New Taipei 12 had been in Lee’s old district, which covered a third of Taipei County. However, he had always spent most of his energy on Zhonghe. Suddenly, this staunch unification supporter and champion of mainlander interests found himself in an overwhelmingly Taiwanese district with a large rural population. It wasn’t an easy fit. In 2008, Ma Ying-jeou racked up 62.5% of the vote in the district, but Lee Ching-hua could only manage 52.0%. Likewise, in 2012 Ma collected 55.0%, but Lee squeaked by in a three-way race with a meagre 42.1%. There were plenty of blue votes, but Lee was consistently unable to soak them all up.

In 2016, the DPP designated New Taipei 12 as a “difficult” district. The 2012 candidate, city councilor Shen Fa-hui 沈發惠, wanted the DPP nomination, but Tsai Ing-wen eventually prevailed upon him to withdraw so that they could yield the district to Huang Kuo-chang 黃國昌 and thus cement their alliance with the newly established New Power Party. Huang defeated Lee (51.5-43.7%) in the general election, with both sides soaking up almost all of their camp’s presidential votes (53.1-46.9%). With historical perspective, Huang’s victory isn’t as impressive as many contemporary observers thought. Huang basically fought a very weak KMT candidate to a draw but was able to ride Tsai’s coattails to victory.

In that 2016 election, one of the minor candidates was from the Faith and Hope League, whose main demand was to stop the legalization of same-sex marriage. He didn’t get that many votes, just under 5,000, but his presence might have signaled the coming troubles for Huang. As the leader of the NPP, Huang did not bother doing a lot of constituency service. Sensing vulnerability and seeking to make a statement against the leader of the marriage equality movement, local anti-marriage activists put together a successful recall petition drive and forced Huang to face a recall vote. The turnout was not high enough to remove Huang from office, but significantly more people voted against him than for him.

It was never clear whether the 2016 alliance between the DPP and NPP would extend to the 2020 election. In the legislature, the NPP continually struggled with the question of how closely it wanted to work with the DPP and whether it should try to establish a separate identity or even announce a willingness to work with other parties. Huang Kuo-chang favored maximizing the NPP’s bargaining power by positioning the NPP as an unaligned party that could negotiate with any party willing to give it a better deal. Back in New Taipei 12, this position understandably caused a rift with the DPP. If the NPP wasn’t going to be a reliable partner, there was no need for the DPP to return the favor. Even though Huang was still publicly running for re-election, Shen Fa-hui announced that he would seek the DPP nomination. Shen even gave up his city council seat in order to concentrate on the legislative race. For the first half of 2019, both Shen and Huang were angling to represent the green side on the ballot, with no guarantee that one would yield. In late June, however, Shen announced he was abandoning his bid. The dominant media explanation was that forces inside the DPP – probably a reference to President Tsai – wanted to yield the seat to Huang again. However, even though the DPP decided it would cooperate with Huang, Huang wasn’t sure he wanted to cooperate with the DPP. In late August, Huang announce he would not seek re-election, and instead the NPP would be represented by Lai Chia-lun 賴嘉倫, who ran his Xizhi constituency service office. Some people speculate that Huang had decided he wanted to run for Taipei mayor, perhaps in alliance with Ko Wen-je. Perhaps he simply decided that he wasn’t going to win re-election. Either way, Huang’s announcement threw the green side of the race wide open. The DPP did not consider Lai Chia-lun to be a viable candidate, so it announced it would nominate its own person.

It was not until mid-September that the DPP drafted Lai Pin-yu 賴品妤, a 27 year-old former Sunflower leader. Lai’s father, Lai Chin-lin 賴勁麟, was a DPP legislator from 1998 to 2004. A member of the New Tide faction, he claimed to represent labor interests. Like Lee Ching-hua, he technically represented Xizhi. However, even more than Lee, the elder Lai ignored Xizhi votes. His support was almost entirely in the urban Zhonghe, Yonghe, and Xindian areas. If the DPP thought that Lai Pin-yu could simply reactivate her father’s dormant network in Xizhi, they were making a big mistake. Her father never had a network in Xizhi, so Lai Pin-yu would have to start from scratch.

Over on the blue side, the process was more orderly. After the 2018 triumph, New Taipei 12 was seen as an almost certain pickup. The only question was which KMT figure would win the seat. Three people registered for the KMT primary, a local lawyer and two candidates from Taipei. Of the three, Lee Yung-ping 李永萍 had by far the most impressive resume, having served as legislator and Taipei City deputy mayor. The local lawyer was supported by the local factions, and usually local candidates beat famous outsiders in polling primaries. You might think that, after putting up with the outsider Lee Ching-hua for over a decade, the local politicians might be desperate to grab control of this seat. However, for some reason, the local forces did not prevail. Lee Yung-ping won the May polling primary. The early resolution and the chaos over on the green side did give Lee one big advantage. While she may be an outsider, she has had a six-month head start over Lai Pin-yu in making local connections. Lee has been talking to local people since March or April, while Lai didn’t start until September. That head start might prove decisive, especially in appealing to the rural areas of the district.

One big question has nagged at me for the past several months. Why are the candidates so terrible? There are four perfectly competent former and current city councilors who have deep roots and high popularity in this district. Any one of those two KMT and two DPP politicians could have easily won their party’s nomination, and any one of them would have been favored to win this general election against the current field of candidates. Why did they all refuse to run? It’s almost as if the KMT, DPP, and NPP are actively trying to lose this district. Every time one of them shoots itself in the foot, the other compete to choose an even less appealing candidate.

At any rate, there are four candidates in the race. The KMT and DPP candidates will compete to win the race, while the number of votes siphoned away by the NPP and Stabilizing Force Party might swing the balance between the top two. Lee Yung-ping is stressing her experience and qualifications, while Lai Pin-yu stresses her youth and idealism. Lee says that Lai is too inexperience, while Lai retorts that Lee has extensive experience at doing the wrong things. Realistically, Lai’s only hope is to be dragged along to victory by Tsai Ing-wen. Lee, unlike some other KMT candidates, is not trying to distance herself from Han, which might be an unwise choice, given her advantage in candidate quality and in building relationships in the district. It should be a close race. If I had to bet, I might give Lee a small advantage.

 

This brings us to Sunday night’s rally. The rally was held in a big athletic field, surrounded by a running track. This was a fantastic event with a big crowd.

Because it was in such an open area it was fairly easy to see the entire crowd all at once. This makes gauging the size of the crowd quite a bit simpler. Moreover, the stools were laid out in a simple block, so you could cut the crowd in half or into quarters and estimate how many people were in smaller areas, an even easier task. The organizers had laid down mats to protect the grass and then put stools in that area. The stools were almost totally occupied, and I estimate they had seats for about 8,000 people. However, there were also people standing on the grassy periphery of the seating area, and there were people in the grandstand as well. By the end of the event, Mrs. Garlic and I agreed that 10,000 was a pretty good estimate, give or take a thousand people. Once again, let me say: 10,000 people is a LOT of people! This was a huge crowd. And if one gages by the number of stools they prepared, it was larger than they expected.

The crowd was somewhat different from other Han crowds I’ve seen this year. It wasn’t quite as raucous, there weren’t as many vendors selling ROC and Han paraphernalia, and the people weren’t wearing quite so many ROC flag shirts, hats, and other clothing. This should be seen as good news for Han. At some other events, I got the impression that a significant proportion of the crowd were serial rally attendees (like me). I know I’ve seen a few people more than once. However, I think the dedicated Han fans were probably all in Kaohsiung this weekend. The crowd at the Xizhi rally seemed much more local and much less cultish. In other words, this crowd had far more normal people and far fewer of the Church of Han choir. Again, that is a good sign for Han; he is once again showing an ability to reach out beyond his core supporters to a slightly wider audience.

 

It has been several days since the rally, and things are running together in my mind. Rather than discuss each speaker individually, I’m just going to make a couple of points about the event as a whole.

The speakers mentioned the crowd size several times. One early speaker proclaimed there were 30,000 people. The emcee must not have been paying attention, because soon after he congratulated the crowd on exceeding 10,000. Toward the end of the event, they decided on 20,000 as the number and repeated that several times. They also told us several times that this was now the largest political rally in Xizhi’s history. At the end of the event, just after Han finished speaking, someone repeated the 20,000 number, and then, within 30 seconds, someone else proclaimed that the crowd had reached 30,000. The speakers also talked quite a bit about the crowd sizes at the Kaohsiung marches, assuring the audience that the 350,000 people claimed by the Han side was an accurate number while the 500,000 claimed by the other side was a complete falsehood.

Now that the Han camp has proclaimed polls are meaningless, crowd sizes are particularly important to them. This is now the main way they publicly measure their popularity. As long as the crowds are large, they can reassure their supporters that Han is still competitive. If the crowds become too small, they risk seeing morale drop and turnout suffer.

However, there is a deeper meaning to the Han obsession with crowd size. These crowds are the concrete representation of what Han calls “ordinary people” (庶民, shumin). Han’s entire appeal is framed around these ordinary people, so it is vital that they continue to manifest their support for him. Without that support, he is delegitimized. For exactly the same reason that Donald Trump repeatedly insists his crowds are overflowing, Han needs us to believe that his crowds are massive. Fortunately for Han, his crowds are still very large, even if they aren’t quite as massive as he claims.

 

After the rally, I asked Mrs. Garlic what the KMT’s main points were. She succinctly and brilliantly summed up their entire discourse in a few bullet points:

• Everything used to be good, but now it is bad. People now lead bitter lives.
• The government is working for the DPP, not the people.
  • The DPP spends its energy doling out the spoils of office
  • The DPP corruptly abuses its power to further its own interests
• Governing is simple. Just do the right things to help the people.

 

Everything the speakers at the rally fit neatly into that framework. They talked about how terrible the economy is, and how the DPP government makes up fake numbers to make it look better. They talked about how the ROC used to be widely respected around southeast Asia (everyone loved Teresa Teng’s music!) but now is looked down upon (new Thai tourist visa requirements). They continually hammered the idea that the DPP relies on distributing the spoils of office (酬庸政治), such as “bribing” Lin Fei-fan to join the party by making him deputy secretary general. They talked at length about the Yang Hui-ju case, which they see as an example of using government money to hire internet bullies to suppress their opponents. To them, this is clear-cut corruption. And finally, Han personally delivers the final point, explicitly saying that government is not complicated, you just do things for the people. Sometimes he likens government officials to Chinese gods, since all of them, from the Jade Emperor to the humblest local earth god, benevolently look after the humans in their realm.

 

In my next post, I hope to unpack Han’s discourse and entire appeal at length. Spoiler: It’s populism. Populism is the prism that brings the entire last year and a half into focus. It took me a year and a half to understand this, including three weeks staring blankly after being told exactly where to look and what to look for. It has been populism all along. So let me stop here and start working on that post, which I hope will be much more enlightening than this one.

 

reporting polls in the UDN

What if you are a partisan media outlet, and you have to report news that looks bad for your preferred party? What if you have a lot of flexibility in how you report the story? If you want to maintain a basic level of media ethics, you have to accurately report the basic facts. However, you have a lot of leeway in how you frame those facts, emphasizing some and downplaying others.

In this post, I’m going to look at how the United Daily News has reported its own recent survey results. The UDN has a strong partisan preference for the KMT. (I don’t think even my good friends working for the UDN would dispute the newspaper’s institutional political bias.) However, their own surveys show Han Kuo-yu trailing far, far behind. This isn’t the kind of news that will boost the morale of KMT sympathizers or inspire consumers to purchase lots of UDN copies at 7-11. So how should the UDN report those results?

 

[Aside: This post feels extremely old-fashioned. It’s about print layouts of newspapers. Printed on actual paper. Is this 1993? Yes, yes. Humor me. I know I’m old and out of date. The thing is, even if very few people still read hard copies of newspapers, those few remaining readers are very influential. Newspapers still drive the rest of the media discourse. Newspapers may not break the news any more, but they still provide an irreplaceable blend of depth, authority, and speed. Newspapers are the foundation that everything else is built on top of (including this blog).]

 

How do newspapers ordinarily report their own survey results? Let’s look at a few recent results. Here is a recent survey from the Liberty Times. The survey is in the middle of the first page, and the headline simply reports the horse race numbers. The Liberty Times is a green-leaning newspaper, so they and their readers are probably happy to see those numbers.

Apple Daily is politically more neutral. Their first priority is to sell papers, not to promote either KMT or DPP interests. This is from Dec 3, and their entire front page is dedicated to their poll.

As with the Liberty Times, the main headline is the horse race result. Apple also has consistently fantastic graphics that illustrate something about the race. Here, they are making the point that Han’s attempt to disrupt polling isn’t making it any easier for him to get to the top. [Apple is making a push to encourage readers to purchase digital subscriptions instead of hard copies. Unfortunately, the digital readers don’t get the fun graphics. Sometimes print is better!]

Here’s Apple’s poll from earlier this week (Dec 17). Again, the headline is all about the horse race (in which Han is losing by 29 points).

So that is what normal newspaper stories about the newspaper’s own polls usually look like. What about recent UDN reporting?

Here is the Dec 10 issue of UDN. The headline is not about the horse race. In fact, that is not even mentioned on the front page. The front page story and graphics are all about electoral culture. The headline screams, 45% think green camp online soldiers are ruining electoral culture.

If you read the fine print, that headline seems a bit exaggerated. In this section, they asked four questions. [Note that UDN doesn’t provide their exact question wording, so I – along with all their other readers – am relying on their graphics and reporting.] First, how serious is the problem of purchasing online soldiers? 35% said very serious, 18% said somewhat serious, and 15% said not serious at all. Second, how serious is the problem of untrue mudslinging? 33% said very serious, 20% said somewhat serious, and 23% said not serious at all. Note that these question are set up to produce an impression of a bad electoral culture. The normal, more neutral way to ask would be, “Some people say that purchasing social media influencers or other online influence is a serious problem. Do you think that it is very serious, somewhat serious, not too serious, or not serious at all?” Instead of leading the respondent to assume the problem is serious, the idea is presented as someone’s opinion (which may be totally wrong). There are also two positive answers and two negative answers. The third question asks whether purchasing online soldiers or untrue mudslinging is a more serious problem. They don’t report results from this question, but they use those answers to ask the fourth question, which party is most responsible for this problem? For respondents who thought that buying online soldiers was more serious, 45% blamed the DPP, 19% blamed the KMT, and 1% blamed other parties. This question was the inspiration for the headline. Note that these questions fit neatly into KMT campaign themes. The KMT has been screaming for months that DPP attacks on Han about his real estate dealings, entering the PRC Liason Office in Hong Kong, drinking, etc. are just baseless mudslinging, and they have been complaining that everyone online supports the green camp since at least the Sunflower Movement. Blue supporters know exactly how to answer these questions; green camp sympathizers don’t think about these events in quite the same terminology. If you wanted to give green camp sympathizers an equivalent prompt, you should probably include the PRC as a response category.

Enough of the first page. UDN also dedicated most of page 2 to this survey.

Page 2 covers the horse race, though the horse race (Tsai 48, Han 20, Soong 9) is shown in a somewhat complicated chart that you have to stare at for a while to understand. However, the horse race is not the main theme of page 2. The main theme is that you should not believe those results. The headline reads, “Only 29% believe the gap between Tsai and Han is large.”

[Begin rant. The inset story reinforces this headline by quoting people who feel that the gap shouldn’t be that big. Who cares what the numbers actually say? I feel that Han is doing better. Well, if you are just going to substitute your feelings for data, why bother collecting data? Even more, one scholar explains that people feel the race should be closer because they think Tsai is doing such a bad job. However, as we will see below, voters are currently relatively satisfied with Tsai’s performance. Never mind, someone feels she’s doing a bad job and she isn’t leading. End rant.]

Again, the headline is stretching the truth. The question was (apparently), “Concerning surveys showing the Han-Chang ticket trailing by a large margin, what is your opinion?” 29% thought that he was really losing by a large margin, 24% thought that he was trailing but not by as much as media reports said, 22% thought that surveys are inaccurate and he was not trailing, and 25% did not know. What exactly does that 24% mean? If they have just seen a survey that says Tsai is leading by 35% and they think Han’s attempt to undermine polling has had a small but real effect so that maybe Tsai is “only” leading by 28%, they could be in that middle category. That is, they could easily believe that Tsai is leading Han by a lot. The percentage who think that the gap between Tsai and Han is “large” could be anywhere between 29% and 53%. Again, this question was set up to produce a headline palatable to their editors and readers rather than to faithfully report public opinion.

 

UDN produced another poll this week. Here are the first two pages from Dec 16.

By now, UDN has wholeheartedly swallowed the assumption that polls of the presidential race are meaningless. They don’t even bother to write a story or produce a graphic dedicated to the horse race. The result (Tsai 48, Han 22, Soong 9) is buried in the middle of the story halfway down page 2. It’s there, but you have to look really hard to find it. In essence, they have simply adopted the Han camp position that polls are no longer informative.

A good friend and frequent blue-leaning media pundit recently complained on his Facebook page that it was irresponsible to interpret a poll without taking Han’s ploy to undermine surveys. He is correct. However, it is just as irresponsible to go too far in the opposite direction and dismiss polls altogether. Han has muddied the waters, but polls still convey useful information. Other pollsters are trying to figure out how much Han’s ploy matters. Look back at the Dec 17 issue of Apple Daily. On the bottom right corner, they produce an adjustment for latent Han supporters. You might argue that their adjustment is wrong, but at least they are trying.

 

Public intellectuals complain all the time that the media focuses too much on the horse race and not enough on substantive questions. So what substantive concerns are the UDN emphasizing? The headline screams that fewer than 30% of people think that Taiwan is better off under DPP government. Wow, Tsai must be doing a terrible job.

Or maybe not. Let’s look at their evidence. They asked something like, “The DPP has had complete control of government for over three years. During that period, have ordinary people’s lives gotten better, gotten worse, or stayed about the same?” “In the same period, has Taiwan’s overall development gotten better, gotten worse, or stayed about the same?” For the first, 13% said better, 29% worse, and 49% same; for the second question, 23% said better, 30% worse, and 38% said the same.

These are good, neutral questions. The modal result is that things are about the same, but more people think things are worse than better. The headline is not unfactual, but it misleads readers by giving the impression of a binary question. If fewer than 30% think that things are getting better, does that mean that more than 70% think that things are getting worse? No, it does not.

Things getting better or worse is a meaningful question, but it is not the same as asking whether the DPP government is doing a good job. In the 2012 election, the DPP tried to argue that President Ma had failed miserably to fulfill his 633 promise (6% growth, 3% unemployment, USD30,000 per capita income), so he must have done a bad job as president. Of course, Ma had an easy answer: he had done a good job, but the external circumstances – the Global Financial Crisis – had made it impossible to meet the 633 promise. By re-electing Ma, voters effectively agreed with the proposition that, even though things had gotten worse, Ma had done a reasonably good job.

Voters seem to be making a similar judgment about Tsai’s performance. Even if most people either think things are about the same or worse, many of those people think she has done a good job. The line chart on page 1 shows changes in Tsai’s approval rating over her term, and she is now at 48% satisfied. Holy Crap!! UDN has (intentionally) buried the lede!! She was 43 points underwater just after last year’s election, but she is 10 points above water now. Maybe she’s not doing such a terrible job after all.

The text tries to minimize Tsai’s positive approval rating by saying that of the people who approve of Tsai’s performance, 43% couldn’t name a specific policy that they are satisfied with. Of people who did give an answer, 15% said pension reform, 10% said maintaining Taiwan’s sovereignty, and 7% cited the legalization of same-sex marriage. (These response categories were unprompted, which is one reason many people did not name anything.) I’m not surprised by sovereignty, but I am a bit surprised that pensions and marriage equality were so high on the list.

 

On page 2, UDN continues to try to paint a cynical picture of Taiwan’s democracy. The headline reads, “Most voters don’t believe Tsai and Han will fulfill their campaign promises.” That headline is a bit problematic, but we’ll get to that later.

Before that, we have to talk about the graphic. This is what finally broke me. The top part of the graphic says that it is about using policies to buy votes and recklessly making campaign promises. The first line reads, “the government’s increases of stipends and subsidies,” while the second line reads, “making reckless campaign promises.” For the former, 25% say it is very serious, 21% say somewhat serious, and 29% say not serious. For the latter, 42% say very serious, 31% say somewhat serious, and 11% say not serious. There are several problems. First, the response categories are unbalanced. If you have three categories, you need one positive, one negative, and one neutral. If you provide two negative response categories, you need to balance them with two positive response categories. This is basic survey methodology, and everyone at UDN from the person in charge of the survey unit all the way up to the editor-in-chief knows this. Second, the use of the word “serious” presumes that something is wrong. What if you think that subsidies have been increased a lot and that this is fantastic? Third, the question asks about increases in subsidies and stipends, but the headlines and text have transformed this into “policy vote buying.” Survey respondents were never asked about “policy vote buying.”  Fourth, the way the graphic is put together, the first question is about something the government is doing, which makes it look like the second question is also about something the government is doing. However, the text clarifies that respondents were asked whether candidates had made reckless campaign promises. That is, it refers to ANY candidates, not necessarily the candidate representing the government or even most candidates. A response of “serious” is not necessarily an indictment of the government. In fact, if you keep reading the fine print, it isn’t at all. For people who responded that the problem was serious, they then asked which candidate was the worst offender. 51% named Han, 26% said Soong, and 1% replied Tsai. (Only 1%!!!) The UDN produced these questions and this graphic to give the impression that Tsai is spending and promising recklessly in order to get re-elected. In fact, a closer look at the data suggests that voters mostly think she is acting responsibly. Han is the one making crazy promises.

The main headline is taken from the bottom half of the graphic. They asked, if Tsai is re-elected, do you believe she will fulfill her campaign promises. They then asked the same question for Han. For Tsai, 43% said they believed she would, 40% said the did not believe she would, and 17% didn’t know. For Han, 23% believed, 59% did not believe, and 18% didn’t know. Recall that the headline proclaimed that most people do not believe the candidates will fulfill their promises. For Han, this is accurate. For Tsai, however, this requires manipulating the words a bit. To get to “most,” you have to lump together all the categories other than “believe” and call them “not believe.” However, there was already a category explicitly labeled “not believe,” and this category was far below 50%. Given the pattern of reporting, I’m not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt; I have to assume this was an intentional slight of hand to make Tsai look just as bad as Han. In fact, more people believed than disbelieved Tsai would fulfill her promises, while over twice as many disbelieved Han as believed him. They are not equally bad; Han is the one with a credibility problem.

 

I understand that UDN has a partisan line and its readers want things presented in a partisan way. However, UDN has a fundamental responsibility to uphold basic media ethics. The construction of these survey questions and the reporting of the results goes right up to the edge of that ethical line and then slips over it a few times. The headlines, in particular, are consistently designed to mislead. I’m also quite offended by UDN’s failure to use balanced response categories. UDN likes to say that it is the paper of record in Taiwan, with a stature equivalent to the New York Times in the USA. If it aspires to such a lofty standard, it must do a better job prioritizing its duty to report facts neutrally over its partisan preferences.

The first “debate” is over

Yesterday, the three presidential candidates spent an hour on TV talking about why they should be president and why the others should not. This forum was organized by the Central Election Commission, and it wasn’t a true debate. No one asked questions, and they did not have any quick-fire back and forth or interruptions. Instead, they each spoke for thirty minutes each, with three rounds of ten-minute speeches. The CEC holds these forums for all elections, and they are supposed to be for candidates to present their platforms. People rarely pay attention to them since they are always pretty boring. However, since this one was the first time all three presidential candidates have been on the same stage, it got a bit more notice.

I had intended to produce a full writeup of the forum, but, honestly, I can’t bring myself to do it. The candidates all made their speeches and hit their high notes. They attacked each other, and defended themselves. I thought that maybe Tsai did a bit better than Han, but, generally, I think that almost all partisans will feel that it was either even or their candidate came out on top.

The most important result of this forum is that it is over, and it didn’t produce any big headlines. As any presidential race winds to its conclusion, the media starts to look at the debates as the last major scheduled event that has the potential to change voters’ minds. When one candidate is clearly trailing, as Han currently is, the debates are seen as their last best chance to reset the race.

In fact, presidential debates rarely have much effect. In American presidential debate history, there are a few famous moments that we remember. In fact, those moments rarely matter as much as we think. One reason debates aren’t so important is that we quickly lose interest. The first debate gets a lot of hype, but then the second and third debates get far lower levels of attention. By the time a VP debate is held, only political junkies are still watching. The first debate is usually the only one that really matters. However, if one candidate has a terrible first debate, they (almost always) get a second chance. In 1984 and 2012, Presidents Reagan and Obama had terrible first debates. Luckily for them, they did much better in the second debates, and voters mostly drifted back to their original positions. So even if the first debate produces a potential game-changer, it rarely ends up as an actual game-changer. The same candidate has to trounce their opponent again and again, meeting a higher and higher threshold of expectations each time.

This year, we are scheduled to have three of these CEC policy forums and then (I think) one more traditional debate. Arranging the schedule in this way is very advantageous to Tsai. Han needs a knockout, and this schedule minimizes the possibility that he will get one. Since the policy forums don’t provide much opportunity for a candidate to back their opponent into a corner, a dramatic win is unlikely. Now that we have finished the first forum, fewer and fewer people will pay attention to the next two forums. The first one was pretty boring, so why would you want to sit through two more of those? By the time the traditional debate rolls around, people will have had three opportunities to watch the candidates on stage. I somehow don’t expect there to be a whole lot of people watching. And even if Tsai does commit a gaffe, it will just be one mistake over several hours of TV presentations.

One of the traditional perils of debates for incumbents is that they are overconfident. Presidents think they know the relevant policy details, and they don’t need to spend a day or two cramming for the exam. President Obama is the classic example of this, but it also happened to President Carter and probably a few others. Tsai was likewise overconfident and ill-prepared for the ECFA debate she had with President Ma in 2010. However, the current schedule lets her ease into the debates. Han had one or two opportunities to press her, and some of her defense statements seemed a bit choppy. It should be a good reminder to her that she needs to take debate prep seriously.

So while there were a few interesting points made in this debate, those were relatively minor tactical details. The most important result is that today the media is already talking about other topics.