For the last four years, maybe eight years, I have assumed that the green camp’s base of voters was bigger than the blue camp’s. For most of this period, the DPP has had significantly higher party ID than the KMT. President Tsai has not always had fantastic approval ratings, but they have usually been at least decent. Most importantly, roughly twice as many people identify as Taiwanese and as both Taiwanese and Chinese, and this sense of national identity is the bedrock that the party system is built on. That didn’t mean the blue camp could never win. Candidate quality matters, issues matter, scandals matter, and all kinds of other things can matter. Unexpected things can always happen. However, it meant that the blue camp was always running uphill, while the green camp was always running downhill. All things equal, it was more likely that the DPP would win a contest than the KMT.
Recent surveys have made me question whether the KMT is successfully overcoming those structural disadvantages during this campaign. I’m no longer sure the the green camp is larger today than the blue camp.
I wrote a post a couple of months ago speculating on whether the DPP’s advantage was eroding a bit. The main evidence for this possibility came from Formosa polls, which asked whether respondents had good feelings or bad feelings toward the KMT and DPP. I like this question because it tells you something about the political preferences of a large group of people who won’t answer a traditional party ID question. In the traditional party ID question, around 30 to 40% will not give an answer. The percentage of non-responses in these questions about good or bad feelings towards parties is only about half that much, and sometimes even less.
The DPP enjoyed an enormous advantage on this question in 2020 and 2021, and a smaller but still clear advantage in 2022 and most of 2023. However, in the September survey their advantage shrunk dramatically. They still maintained an advantage in party ID, but this question about feelings looked like a red flag to me. It was something I wanted to keep an eye on.
Since that post came out, we have gotten the October and November Formosa surveys. There wasn’t very much in them to make the DPP feel cheerful. October was particularly bad for the DPP. While it bounced back a bit in November, the KMT continued to improve.
In the post after the September survey, I noted that party ID had been fairly stable. That is no longer the case. For most of the year, the DPP has maintained a 10 to 15% advantage over the KMT in party ID. After these two months, the KMT has climbed to 24.0%, its highest point in this survey since before Tsai’s reelection. With the DPP at 29.9%, the gap between the two parties is only 5.9%.
But wait, there is one more party to consider. The TPP has gotten 12% in the last two surveys, which isn’t quite as high as the 14 or 15% it was getting in the summer but is still a substantial amount. Those respondents will probably vote for Ko in the presidential election, but most of the legislative races will be one-on-one KMT versus DPP contests, and they will probably break predominantly for the KMT. You never get 100% of a group doing the same thing, but it could be enough of the TPP supporters voting for the KMT that the party ID figures indicate a tied contest or even a slight KMT advantage.
The trends in the questions about feelings towards parties are equally dramatic. After the September survey, I took notice because the DPP’s usual net advantage of 20% or so had been cut in half to only 10.1%. In October, that DPP advantage disappeared altogether, becoming a KMT net advantage of 3.9%. The two sides regressed a little bit towards their previous patterns in November so that the DPP eked out a tiny 1.1% net advantage. Essentially, the advantage they held on this question for three and a half years is now completely gone. The number of voters sympathetic (or antagonistic) to the blue camp is almost the same has the number of voters sympathetic (or antagonistic) to the green camp.
What do these numbers mean in terms of electoral outcomes? The November Formosa survey gives a fairly common (during this last week) picture of the presidential race, with Lai at 36.6%, Hou at 30.5%, and Ko at 17.7%. Lai is still the favorite, but it’s certainly not a sure thing.
What we don’t see as often are numbers for the legislative races. The Formosa survey shows a slight edge for the KMT. In the district races, 32.1% say they will vote for the KMT, 29.5% for the DPP, and 7.5% for the TPP. In the party list races, 33.2% say they will vote for the KMT, 29.6% for the DPP, and 13.3% for the TPP. There’s a lot that goes into determining who wins how many seats beyond just the national vote totals. However, if those are the national vote totals, it looks to me like the most likely outcomes are either a hung parliament in which the TPP holds the balance of power or an outright KMT majority.
All the standard caveats apply. No one has voted yet, and no one has won anything yet. There are still 40 days to go, and lots of things will happen between now and Election Day. From one point of view, you might expect things to improve for the DPP. After all, it should be easier for the DPP to win back voters who have been sympathetic to it in the past than for the KMT to reach even further into the pool of voters who have usually voted DPP for the last decade. However, there’s no guarantee things will work out that way. The KMT has been running uphill all this time while the DPP has been running downhill, and here they are running neck and neck. It might be that eight years of fatigue with the DPP government outweigh the structural advantages of national identity this year.
We spent most of the last two weeks glued to the drama unfolding as the KMT and TPP tried two form a unity ticket (or perhaps they tried to avoid blame for not forming one).
Meanwhile something interesting has happened in the polls. Lai, who has enjoyed a healthy lead for almost the entire campaign, has slipped a little. Ko has gone up a little bit. But most dramatically, Hou, has gone up quite a bit. In fact, in the most recent Formosa daily tracking poll, Hou and Lai are basically tied at 31% and Ko is not too far behind at 25%. Remember, the Formosa poll is consistently one of the worst for Ko. There are other polls in which he is the leader. More broadly, most of the recent polls show better results for the opposition and worse results for the DPP.
There’s a good argument to be made right now that the polls say it’s a 3-way toss-up. If Lai is no longer the clear leader, and Hou and Ko both have very good shots of winning, shouldn’t we be talking about this a whole lot more? Shouldn’t this be the big story of the day?
Perhaps, but then again maybe not. There are two ways to look at these survey results. On the one hand, we can take them at face value and believe that this is actually a razor close race. The green side has slipped a bit, and both candidates from the opposition have made up quite a lot of ground. This might be the correct interpretation. I usually feel a bit queasy when I find myself disagreeing with polling results.
On the other hand, there is a reason to be a bit skeptical. One of the lessons we (re)learned four years ago is that the parties tend to get polling bump after their nomination contests. Four years ago, both Tsai and Han got a nice boost after they won their polling primary, but this was a temporary boost that faded away within a week or two. I don’t think they actually were more popular in that in those periods. I think that this was an artificial boost resulting from how people responded to polls differently for a short while. When the party you support has a nomination contest, you tend to be more engaged in politics. You probably have an opinion about which aspirant would be a better nominee and you might be more eager to talk about this. A lot of people want to express their opinion. When the nomination is actually determined by polling results, supporters want to participate in the polls. They might even wait by their phone just in case a pollster calls. Meanwhile, people who like the other parties tend to be standoffish. This isn’t their fight, and they don’t pay such close attention. They don’t have a strong opinion about the topic of the day – the nomination fight – that they really want to express, so they aren’t as eager to talk to pollsters. Whatever the mechanism, supporters of the party having a nomination contest tend to be overrepresented in the polls for a while.
I suspect something like this might be happening in the current polls, and they will revert to the previous patterns in a week or two. However, we must remain open to the possibility that this is not an artificial trend, and Hou really has made some headway. We will just have to wait and see what the data say in a week or two.
Let’s take a trip back in time to 1996 and the first popular, direct presidential election in Taiwan. There were four candidates in the race. Lee Teng-hui 李登輝 won easily with 54% of the vote. The DPP nominated Peng Ming-min 彭明敏, who was by far the most inept and incompetent candidate they have ever put up. (I’ll never forget the time a young voter asked him about his social policy and his response was, “We don’t really talk about those kinds of things.”) He got a miserable 21%. 4th place went to Chen Li-an 陳履安, the son of former Taiwan governor and KMT stalwart Chen Cheng 陳誠. He ran as a morally superior politician and got 10%.
But I want to talk about the guy who came in third place, Lin Yang-kang 林洋港. A-kang-pei 阿港伯 was a folksy, grassroots politician who everybody liked. He was famous for his ability to hold his liquor. There are plenty of stories like the one in which he solved a local dispute about where to build an elementary school by telling the two faction leaders that whoever could out drink him could decide where to put the school. When he had drunk both of them under the table, he rode his bicycle back to his office and made the decision himself. He had risen all the way to Nantou County magistrate before he was plucked out of local politics into the national scene as part of Chiang Ching-Kuo’s Taiwanization initiative. He was appointed Taipei mayor and then Taiwan governor, and he won plaudits for his performance and both jobs. And no one failed to notice that he was one step ahead of Lee Teng-hui in both jobs. However, Lee passed Lin in 1984 when Lee was chosen as vice president, and Lin spent the rest of his career trying to catch back up to Lee. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, during the KMT’s mainstream versus non-mainstream factional battles, Lin was increasingly associated with the anti-Lee non-mainstream faction. So when the presidency was opened up to popular election in 1996, everyone knew that Lin was going to run against Lee. And Lin was expected to mount a formidable challenge. In fact, I remember hearing one argument that the reason Taiwan doesn’t have a two-round presidential election with a majority runoff is because KMT was afraid of Lin. The thinking was that the DPP was too weak to present a real challenge, so Lin would probably come in second place. In a majority runoff, the DPP might throw its support to Lin, and that might be enough to defeat the KMT. Rather than risk that nightmare scenario, the KMT decided to simply set up a one-round presidential election.
As the campaign got underway, however, it became apparent that Lin’s campaign wasn’t taking off. He needed to do something to jolt the race back in his favor. So he selected Hau Pei-tsun 郝柏村 as his vice presidential candidate.
Hau is an important figure in Taiwan’s history, and you probably know a little bit about him. So I’m going to just give a very brief sketch to try to illustrate just how large he loomed in the politics of the early 1990s. Hau had been head of the military since 1981. That position is supposed to rotate regularly in order to ensure that nobody gets too much military power and civilians stay in control. However, even CCK hadn’t dared to try to remove Hau when his term was supposedly up. When CCK died and Lee succeeded him as president, Hau had firm control over the entire military apparatus. And since the military was the ultimate guarantor of the KMT authoritarian regime, it’s not too much to say that the entire democratization movement – and I’m including both the Tangwai movement as well as the reformist wing within the KMT – was a struggle against Hau. When people talk about what a political genius Lee Teng-hui was, Exhibit A is usually how he promoted Hau up to minister of defense and then premier, removing him from his power base in the military, and then forced him out of power entirely when the new 2nd Legislature, which was no longer dominated by old Mainlanders, demanded the right to confirm a premier aligned with its preferences. Hau led the KMT’s non-mainstream faction, and his most ardent supporters in the legislature, known as the New KMT Alliance, broke away in 1993 to form the New Party. (The most charismatic of these splittist legislators was a fellow named Jaw Shau-kang 趙少康.)
Hau never joined the New Party,* and Lin and Hau ran as an independent ticket. However, from the moment Lin announced Hau as his running mate, the character of his campaign changed dramatically. Suddenly, the Lin presidential effort was a New Party vehicle. Most of the campaign workers came from the New Party, all the messages came straight out of the New Party platform, and visually the entire campaign turned yellow, the color of the New Party. Lin Yang-kang faded into the background. When the results were announced, Lin’s votes were highly correlated with the New Party votes in the National Assembly elections on the same day (except in Nantou County, Lin’s home base).
*Hau’s son, future Taipei mayor Hau Lung-pin 郝龍斌, started his political career as a candidate for the New Party in the 1995 legislative elections. Many interpreted this as a tacit endorsement of the New Party by the elder Hau.
At the time, I was an MA student in political science at NCCU and a research assistant at the Election Study Center. We talked about politics almost every day over lunch, and I distinctly remember one of the professors perfectly summarizing Lin’s campaign in an extremely succinct and pithy formula: 林加郝等於郝 (Lin + Hau = Hau).
Let’s return to today. Is history repeating itself? Hou Yu-ih 侯友宜 is, to put it delicately, not a particularly dynamic or forceful candidate. I am continually surprised by how little deference the KMT pays to Hou. They don’t seem to look to him for leadership, ideas, values, strategy, policy formation, or dispute resolutions. To put it more bluntly, there are several other people who seem to be more influential KMT leaders than its presidential candidate, including Eric Chu 朱立倫, Ma Ying-jeou 馬英九, Han Kuo-yu 韓國瑜, and now, potentially, Jaw Shau-kang.
Even at his advanced age, Jaw remains an energetic and charismatic personality. He has been out of the first line of politics, that is elected office, appointed office, or party positions, for almost three decades. However, he has remained engaged by maintaining an active presence in the media. He can talk forcefully and persuasively on just about any subject had to drop off the hat. I have seen him many times on the campaign trail in the last decade stumping for various candidates. Let me assure you that he hasn’t forgotten how to work a crowd. And since he has been paying attention to national politics for a few decades while Hou has been busy with police work and then local New Taipei City politics, it’s possible, or maybe even probable, Jaw understands most of the issues better than Hou.
And right off the bat, Jaw is showing signs an of intention to play a major role in this campaign. Yesterday, on the day he was announced as the VP candidate, he told the media that he would take responsibility for most of the campaigning in the north while Hou would take responsibility for the central and southern Taiwan. There are three things that are unusual about that statement. First, he is claiming responsibility for an area with nearly half the population more than, more than half of the wealth, and more than half of the KMT’s vote base, including a disproportionate number of their most ardent supporters. That’s a pretty big mandate to claim for yourself. Second, he is relegating Hou to the rest of the country. But Hou is the presidential candidate! The presidential candidate should campaign everywhere! Third, it’s usually up to the president’s campaign team to decide who goes where. The VP candidate doesn’t usually determine his own schedule. Just a few days ago, when a reporter asked Bi-Khim Hsiao 蕭美琴 where she planned to campaign, she replied that the Lai campaign would send her where she could have the most effect. That’s how it normally goes. Jaw is acting like he’s the boss, not Hou.
In the same story, Hou seemed to indicate he planned to ensure Jaw would wield quite a bit of power, promising that Jaw would not merely hold an empty, symbolic position. Rather, he would be involved in foreign affairs, cross straits, national defense, and even domestic policy decisions.
It’s not hard to imagine the more eloquent, loquacious, creative, and informed Jaw becoming the dominant personality in the campaign while Hou recedes somewhat into the background.
So does Hou plus Jaw equal Jaw?
That’s probably overstating things a little. Unlike Lin in 1996, Hou represents the KMT, which has all the organizational muscle in this campaign. Jaw, charismatic as he is, is just a single person. It’s highly unlikely that Hou will become an afterthought in his own campaign to the extent that Lin did.
Still, it looks to me like Jaw might be the most prominent and influential VP candidate in quite a while.
It was just over a week ago that Ma ying-jeou thoroughly shook the presidential race up by introducing the real possibility of a unity ticket for the opposition. When he said he didn’t care whether it was Hou or Ko who led the ticket, it looked like it was possible that the KMT would yield the top spot to Ko and thereby unify the opposition. It looked like Ma was flexing his muscles and forcing the KMT to do something it was reluctant to do.
But once Ma browbeat Chu and Hou into sitting down with Ko, he seemed to think his job was done. Unless he was doing some serious arm twisting behind the scenes, it seems he didn’t lift another finger to actually force cooperation. In the two high profile public meetings, Ma insisted that his only role was to be a witness and that he should not speak at all. And since none of the other people were interested in how cooperation before Ma made his move, it’s not surprising that no cooperation was to be found.
So what was the point of all of that? It showed that Ko is an inept negotiator. That the KMT doesn’t trust Hou to act on his own without a chaperone. That the two sides were more interested in negotiating who got which positions of power than the difficult details of the actual nomination procedures. That all sides were happy to make insincere arguments and try to shift the blame to the other sides. It increased distrust among the various players as well as their supporters, making it less likely the voters will vote strategically and concentrate their votes on the leading candidate in January. It demonstrated that none of them actually think that defeating the DPP is so important that they’re willing to sacrifice any of their personal or partisan interests.
This morning was the big reveal. The experts would announce the results of the surveys and tell us who was going to head the ticket and who was going to take the second spot, and then we would have a great photo op with the two candidates raising their hands and promising to lead the joint ticket to victory.
It didn’t quite work out that way.
The rules of the game were not spelled out clearly in the agreement three days ago, so as you might expect, the two sides did not agree on what to look at, much less what the results were. The KMT said that there were nine surveys, of which Hou won 8, and the TPP said that there were only 6 valid surveys and both sides won three each. That is, the KMT thought that Hou was clearly victorious, while the TPP argued that the situation is still unresolved. At present, both sides say that they are still working towards cooperation, but all signs point to a deadlock and potential breakdown.
Before we get into that, let’s look at the results.
There were nine polls proposed for consideration. Each poll asked two questions: “Do you support a Hou-Ko ticket or Lai-Hsiao ticket?” and “Do you support a Ko-Hou ticket or a Lai-Hsiao ticket? Each survey had a different margin of error based on the sample size. Everyone agrees on this set of facts. They don’t agree on much else.
pollster
Q1 Hou Ko
Q1 Lai Hsiao
Q2 Ko Hou
Q2 Lai Hsiao
Margin of error
1
UDN
42.00
36.00
41.00
36.00
±2.90
2
KMT
38.20
30.60
38.80
29.30
±2.55
3
東森
39.93
34.53
39.30
34.80
±2.94
4
匯流
46.10
41.60
48.30
39.20
±2.17
5
ETToday
41.60
37.10
39.60
36.20
±2.83
6
鏡電視
46.50
34.90
46.60
33.10
±2.94
7
世新
40.82
35.86
46.01
32.22
±2.94
8
好好聽
44.60
39.50
44.00
37.20
±2.97
9
TPP
39.70
33.00
44.00
32.00
±2.98
The first argument was about which polls should be used. The TPP representative* argued that three of them should not be considered. #5 was conducted using text messages rather than by calling telephones. Respondents had to actively opt in rather than passively be sampled. #3 and #8 were conducted purely by landlines; no cell phones were called. The TPP argued that this meant they could not represent the entire population. The KMT rejected these arguments, arguing that all nine surveys should be considered as valid. The two sides agreed to set this question aside and look first at the other six surveys. However, neither side yielded on this question.
(* The TPP did not appoint Ko’s high school classmate as its expert, as he had suggested he planned to do. Instead, they appointed the head of a polling company. Perhaps one of his staff members persuaded him they needed a professional for this job.)
Personally, I think this was an entirely predictable argument. The TPP should have insisted on only using surveys that included cell phones during the original negotiations. They made a mistake when they didn’t specify what kinds of surveys would be acceptable to them.
A second, and the most intractable, argument was over how to interpret the margin of error. I’m afraid we need to do a very short lesson in statistics to understand each side’s position. So bear with me.
When you do a survey, you always get a point estimate. That is, you get a number such as “35.2% of people support Ko.” This number is almost always wrong. The actual percentage in the full population is almost always a little bit different. The margin of error helps us to understand how much different the actual number might be from our point estimate.
Imagine flipping a coin. The actual probability of getting heads is 50%. If you flip that coin twice, there’s a good chance you won’t get heads exactly one time. Fortunately, large numbers are our friends. If you flip the coin 1000 times, you probably won’t get exactly 500 heads, but you will get pretty close to that. In fact, we know the margin of error for that estimate with 95% confidence is 1/√n, where n is sample size. Since 1/√1000=0.032, we can be 95% sure that we will get between 468 and 532 heads. To put it another way, if we flip the coin 1000 times and get exactly 487 heads, we can be 95% confident that the actual probability is somewhere in the interval of 487 plus or minus 32. Lo and behold, 500 is inside the 95% confidence interval of 455 to 519. If you repeat this exercise an infinite number of times, 95% of the confidence intervals around your point estimates will contain 500.
So let’s imagine a survey with sample size 1068 that shows Ko at 34% and Hou at 30%. Is 34% higher than 30%? Should Ko win this point? 1/√1068=0.030, so Ko’s confidence interval is from 31% to 37%. Ko is statistically significantly higher than 30%, so he wins, right? Not so fast. There is one problem with that, and this is the critical point. Hou’s 30% support is also taken from this survey, so it is also a point estimate and it also has a margin of error. Hou’s 95% confidence interval is between 27% and 33%. These two confidence intervals overlap a little, so we cannot be 95% confident that Ko’s support is, in fact, higher than Hou’s support. Even though Ko leads by 4% and the margin of error is only 3%, 34% and 30% are actually not statistically significantly different.
(This is a point we often ignore in common discourse, where we usually just look at a single number and the margin of error, but if you’ve ever tried to publish a paper in a serious academic journal, you will know that overlapping confidence intervals are the kiss of death, no matter how small the overlap is. Ko, as a distinguished academic, should be well aware of this.)
So, let’s look at how the KMT wants to interpret the results.
pollster
Hou- Ko
MoE
Who is higher?
Who gets a point?
1
UDN
1.00
±2.90
neither
Hou
2
KMT
-0.60
±2.55
neither
Hou
3*
東森
0.63
±2.94
neither
Hou
4
匯流
-2.20
±2.17
neither
Hou
5*
ETToday
2.00
±2.83
neither
Hou
6
鏡電視
-0.10
±2.94
neither
Hou
7
世新
-5.19
±2.94
Ko
Ko
8*
好好聽
0.60
±2.97
neither
Hou
9
TPP
-4.30
±2.98
neither
Hou
Only one of these results is statistically significantly different, so the score is 8 to 1. Even if you throw away the three surveys that the TPP disputes, the score is still 5 to 1 in favor of Hou.
(Actually, it isn’t clear why Ko is deemed to be significantly higher in survey #7. It looks like that should also be within the margin of error. Just after Mrs. Garlic pointed that out to me, a reporter asked Eric Chu about this at the news conference. He did not give a clear answer. We’ll come back to this in a minute.)
(Let’s step back and look at the point estimates and ignore the margin of error for a minute. Ko actually does better in five of the nine surveys. And if you throw away the three disputed surveys, Ko wins 5 out of 6. Remember, Ko was the one who introduced margin of error into this discussion in the first place. Oops.)
OK, now let’s look at how the TPP wants to interpret the results.
pollster
Ko-Lai-(Hou-Lai)
MoE
Who is higher?
Who gets a point?
1
UDN
0.00
±2.90
neither
Hou
2
KMT
1.90
±2.55
neither
Hou
3*
東森
4
匯流
4.60
±2.17
Ko
Ko
5*
ETToday
6
鏡電視
1.90
±2.94
neither
Hou
7
世新
8.83
±2.94
Ko
Ko
8*
好好聽
9
TPP
5.30
±2.98
Ko
Ko
The TPP insists that there are only 6 valid poles, and they think that Ko was significantly higher in three of the polls and no one was significantly higher in the other three. Therefore, each side gets three points.
You can see what they’re doing here. They are using margin of error in the intuitive way, treating it as the standard to differentiate between two point estimates. If the two point estimates differ by more than the margin of error, they consider that to be a statistically significantly different period.
That’s not good statistics, but it is an intuitive argument that they can make to the public. This is why they have yelled loudly that they were comfortable yielding 3%, but the KMT is unfairly insisting on a 6% advantage.
Once again, I have to conclude that Ko did a lousy job of negotiating the terms of this contest. He didn’t stipulate he would yield 3%. He said the result would have to be outside the margin of error. I suppose he might have thought he was yielding 3%; after all, what kind of idiot would yield 6%?
You might have noticed that the point estimates in the two tables are different. This is the third obvious point of contention. In the KMT tables, the numbers are support for Hou minus support for Ko. Lai’s results are ignored. In the TPP tables, they compare Ko’s advantage over Lai to Hou’s advantage over Lai. This doesn’t make a whole lot of difference, but it’s just one more thing that they should have clarified in advance. This whole process was extremely sloppy.
I think these different definitions of the dependent variable might be behind the KMT’s judgment that Ko was the winner of survey #7. The numbers in the KMT table suggest that Ko was not, in fact, significantly higher than Hou on survey #7. (5.19 < 2*2.94) However, in the TPP table, even using the KMT definition of margin of error, Ko was in fact higher than Hou. (8.83 > 2*2.94) I’m guessing the KMT did not want to press the issue and insist on its definition of the point estimate. Since it was not absolutely clear that there was no significant difference, I’m guessing they decided to yield this point. After all, they don’t want to humiliate Ko. They want his support eventually, or at least his supporters’ votes. There’s no harm in giving him a little face.
If this was, in fact, an olive branch, my instincts tell me it’s not nearly enough. The fact that Ko has decided to dispute these results suggests to me that he is still planning on running for the presidency. Everyone is still talking about finding a way to cooperate, but the KMT thinks it has won while the TPP’s thinks it’s still negotiating. Ko suggested this morning that there were still five days before the registration deadline, and that’s enough time to holding traditional polling primary by doing a new survey. (Well, why didn’t they think about that three days ago when there were still eight days left!?) I can’t imagine the KMT agreeing to this. They have to think that the process is already over.
There are three plausible outcomes to this controversy. First, Ko could completely surrender and agree to run as Hou’s vice presidential candidate. I think this is looking less and less likely all the time. Second, he could decide not to run, but also not to serve as Hou’s running mate. He would just drop out and focus on the legislative candidates. The KMT would be on its own, and the TPP would go back to being an opposition party that distrusts both major parties. Third, he could declare that this process was a flat-out fiasco that, if anything, showed him to be the stronger candidate. Then he would righteously announce he was running for the presidency. If I had to guess right now, this is what I would say is most likely.
In either of the first two scenarios, I suspect the two candidates have done themselves no favors. They both want to get votes from each other ‘s supporters, but gluing together in an uneasy coalition will be more difficult now because of the higher level of acrimony between the two sides. Likewise in the third scenario, strategic voting will be more difficult because both sides will be more likely to stick with their first choice no matter what and less likely to think of the other side as their clear second favorite. I suspect both sides would have been better off if they had never started this attempted cooperation, which is quickly turning into a calamitous debacle.
update: As several of the commenters pointed out, the margin of error is a little more complicated than I made it out to be. Sorry, I’m not a great methodologist. The precise formula is quite complicated and you need to know the covariance, which I don’t know how to calculate. They were discussing this in my Line group, and someone gave an example of n=1000 and covariance is 3% so the two variables would have a margin of error of 4.243%. In retrospect this is probably why survey #7 was deemed to show Ko leading, and survey #9 was deemed to show no significant difference.
So I’m wrong about the exact calculation, but the larger point I was trying to make is that the margin of error that you see reported in the media is not actually the standard for determining whether two variables are statistically significantly different.
A week ago, I was pretty confident I understood what was happening in the presidential election. We were heading for a three-way race since Ko and Hou were never going to be able to cooperate. Each was happy to agree on a mechanism that would ensure their own victory, but of course no mechanism could ensure both of their victories so there was no compromise to be found.
That seems like a long time ago. I have been surprised three or four or five times in the last few days. I’m not sure but I won’t be surprised again.
Everything changed when former president Ma Ying-jeou declared that he was in favor of a pure polling primary, and he didn’t care whether Hou or Ko led the ticket. Ma is not the KMT chair, but at several points over the last few years when he didn’t like where things were going, he has stepped in and changed the direction of the party. When party chair Johnny Chiang Chi-chen wanted to explore moving away from the 92 consensus, Ma stepped in and squashed that idea in about 48 hours. Likewise, earlier this year when there were rumors that Hou might try to propose a new framework for dealing with China, Ma visited China and nailed his colors to the mast, declaring that the KMT was a party dedicated to the 92 consensus. And there haven’t been any discussions about alternatives since then. Apparently, this time Ma was not satisfied with Chu and Hou’s apparent intention to run a campaign again both Lai and Ko that would probably lose but would preserve the KMT’s position has as the second party in a two party system. And so Ma stepped in and demonstrated once again that – regardless of who sits in the official party chair – he is the pilot who steers the KMT ship, declaring that the KMT should cooperate with Ko even if that meant yielding the top spot on the ticket.
And that’s what seemed to be happening. Various KMT figures publicly agreed with a pure polling primary, and the momentum seemed to be in favor of Ko leading a joint ticket. It looked as if Chu and Hou were desperately trying to hang on, but their negotiating position seemed to crumble a bit every time I looked up. They quickly gave up on the idea of an open “democratic primary” in which vote ordinary voters would vote for the nominee. A proposal for a “Japanese model,” in which legislators would vote for to determine the nominee, also went nowhere. They held out more hope for a “German model,” in which part of the decision would be based on support for the different parties. However, that proportioned seemed to decline every time I saw a new article, going from 50% to 40% to desperately trying to hold out for 20%. They also were trying to ensure that surveys sampled a smaller proportion of cell phones. Meanwhile, Ko simply stuck to his original position of a pure polling primary with half landlines and half cell phones. As much as they resisted, Chu and Hou seemed to be headed for that destination. Significantly, most KMT figures spoke as if they expected Ko to win this competition; they did not seem to have any confidence that Hou could prevail. Hou had been beating Ko in several recent Formosa polls, but those were all landline interviews. Ko consistently does better in cell phone interviews. Moreover, Ko had been particularly weak during that week due to the controversy over the potential nomination of a mainland spouse and suspected CCP cadre on the TPP party list, but that effect was already fading. Ko was confident enough that he announced he would consider Hou the winner if the difference were within the margin of error.
When the two sides announced they would have a meeting with just four people – Hou, Chu, Ko, and, acting as a witness at Ko’s invitation, Ma – the scene seemed set for Ko’s court coronation. After all, Ma had all but declared that he was in favor of Ko leading the ticket, and it seemed unlikely that either Chu or Hou would have the guts to say “no” to Ma’s face. And sure enough, the sides emerged from the meeting with a signed statement agreeing that they would participate in a contest to see who would lead the ticket.
And then the plot twisted again.
Ko’s staff seemed quite unhappy with the agreement. There were widespread reports that his spokeswoman was crying. Instead of Chu and Hou caving in, it appeared that Ko had completely capitulated.
Because the deadline to file candidacies was so near and there wasn’t time to do a normal polling primary, they agreed to use public polls announced between November 7 and November 17. In addition, the KMT and TPP could each provide one poll. Each poll would count as one point. If one candidate won by more than the margin of error, he would get that point; if the difference were within the margin of error, Hou would get the point. The surveys would be judged by a panel of three experts, one each chosen by the KMT, TPP, and Ma Ying-jeou. (There were also other agreements on subjects such as how to divide up the executive branch, but I won’t get into those.)
Does that seem clear to you? Because it doesn’t seem clear at all to me. There is no mention of what qualifies as a valid poll, how sampling should be done, or what questions should be asked. The KMT gave up its dream of including party preference in the decision making, but that turns out to be a pretty small sacrifice.
Accepting the premise that there wasn’t enough time to do a regular survey was probably a bad mistake by Ko. A lot of consequences flow from the decision not to keep control of the survey. I don’t understand how the KMT and TPP are able to do their own surveys but there isn’t enough time to do a full polling primary.
Cell phones were critical to the TPP strategy, but they didn’t get any guarantee any of the surveys would use cell phones. Apparently, it’s up to the survey company or the agency that commissioned the survey to make that decision. A few days prior, Ko was so confident about his strength (with cell phone users) that he had agreed to concede defeat if the result was within the margin of error. Now, there was no mention of cell phones, but Ko did not insist on retracting the concession about the margin of error.
Later that evening, Ko went on a TV talk show, where the host and the panel grilled him for an hour and a half about the meeting and his decisions. The more he talked, the worse it sounded. (If you understand Mandarin, its a pretty astounding show.)
The agreement covers polls from the 7th to the 17th. Note that this is 11 days, not a more intuitive number such as 7 or 14 or 10 days. Also, the meeting was on the 15th, so there were only two days left. That means that many, maybe most, of the surveys had already been published. They asked Ko if he had looked at the previously published surveys to see who had done better in them. He didn’t have an answer. They asked him specifically why it started on the 7th and whether there was a particular poll published on that date. He didn’t know. They asked who proposed using polls starting on the 7th, and he replied that it was Chu who proposed it. He thought it was OK because the KMT didn’t know at the time that these polls would be used for the nomination so they couldn’t go back in time and retroactively manipulate them. The panel was flabbergasted by Ko’s inability to understand that Chu might be strategically picking the starting date to include favorable polls for Hou.
Ko repeatedly stressed that the process would be fair because the results would be judged by a panel of experts. He seems to not understand that survey results include a lot of subjective interpretations. There is no absolute proper way to judge a survey. You can make reasonable arguments that some surveys should or should not be included, that some questions are equivalent or not to other questions, that some methodologies are scientifically acceptable or not. And don’t even get me started on trying to figure out how to calculate the margin of error in different sampling methods.
Ko mentioned on the talk show that his expert would be a classmate of his. In my LINE group of people associated with the Election Study Center, someone said they knew who Ko was talking about and wondered why he would appoint someone who understood statistics but had no background in polling. It’s quite likely that Ma and/or Chu will appoint an expert from my LINE group. They ARE experts in every aspect of polling, and I expect they will run circles around Ko’s friend, the medical doctor who dabbles in biostatistics.
As far as I can tell, Ko simply got rolled. He likes to think he’s the smartest person in the room, but he bumbled into some stupid decisions. Apparently, they asked all the staff members to leave the room at the beginning of the meeting so that only the four principles were there. Ko said that Ma barely spoke. (Apparently Ma really didn’t care who wins; he just wanted them to cooperate.) That means that Ko was completely outsmarted by Chu and/or Hou (two people who most observers think he looks down on as not his intellectual equals). When they allowed the staff back in the room to see the agreement before they signed it, Ko’s staff was shocked. This was not what they had planned at all. However, Ko overruled them all and signed.
(Aside: This is precisely my nightmare when I think about President Ko negotiating with China. He will think that he is smarter than everyone else and can handle matters, and he won’t be prepared nearly enough. He’ll end up making important choices on the fly. This is how you make stupid, harmful decisions.)
So, where does this leave us? Instead of a coronation for Ko, it appears that Hou is now the overwhelming favorite to win the contest. The critical period was one of the worst time periods for Ko in several months; he hasn’t won very many polls over Hou by more than the margin of error in recent days. The Formosa daily tracking poll is a particular headache or for him. Does it count as a new poll each day with a sample size of 400 and a very large margin of error? Is it a single pole with several thousand respondents had a small margin of error? Or is it something else? Either way, Hou will be the winner; the only question is how many points he gets. And remember, Ko will probably be facing an uphill battle in the panel of experts who will make this decision.
When the decision is announced, assuming it is Hou, that leaves us with a whole new set of questions. Will there be a backlash from TPP supporters? Will the TPP party list suffer since it no longer has a presidential candidate driving media coverage? Will the TPP even survive as a viable party? How will the parties reposition themselves now that it is a traditional KMT versus DPP race? Is it more likely now that we will see unified government with the president and the majority in the legislature coming from the same party? Will Ko accept this result or will he decide to run anyway? Does this make it more or less likely for Terry Gou to actually run? Maybe this election won’t be boring after all.
I haven’t taken a step back to look at the general state of public opinion and the presidential race in several months, so I thought I would do that today.
During the first few years of president Tsai’s second term, the trend was stark. The DPP was quite popular and the KMT’s reputation was dismal. A lot of that was due to the response to the pandemic, but just like in the rest of the world, the pandemic is now old news. No one wants to hear about how well the government handled COVID-19. Democratic elections are usually a question of “what have you done for me lately?” Opposition parties can always find something to criticize, and Taiwan is no different. Not surprisingly, party popularity today doesn’t look very much like party popularity in 2020 or 2021.
It is the case that the DPP is still the most popular party, and Lai is still leading in almost all presidential polls. The numbers have been quite stable for the last two years or so. However, if you look at the data more carefully, there are indications the DPP’s position might not be as solid as it looks at first glance.
As usual, I will be relying on Formosa polls. They repeatedly ask the same questions and publish detailed results in a standardized format. They do not selectively choose a few attention-grabbing results and focus all their attention on those or present the PowerPoint with some but not all of their results. When Formosa wants to highlight a particular result, they write a separate article and publish it separately. I wish other pollsters in Taiwan would follow their example.
However, it is worth noting that the Formosa polls produce slightly different results from many other polls. Generally speaking, Formosa shows Lai to be a little bit stronger than other polls, and Hou to be tied with or even slightly ahead of Ko whereas other polls generally show Ko with a slight lead over Hou. This difference could be due to the fact that Formosa only calls landlines. While they weight their data so that the sample represents the entire population by age, weighting only works if the people you interview are like the people you don’t interview. That may not be the case in current polling. There is a good argument that a representative sample must blend landlines and cell phones. On the other hand, it could also be the case many of the other polls are using junk methodology (such as polling by text messaging or dodgy internet sampling), and those results are not worth thinking about. The polls I trust the most are the ones we do at the Election Study Center at NCCU, and the ESC calls both landlines and cell phones. Unfortunately, ESC does not release up-to-the-minute data about the electoral horse race or even the popularity of parties. However, it is worth noting that if you go back several months and look at the party ID numbers reported in other polls, the Formosa results look more like the ESC results than many of the other pollsters who call both cell phones and landlines. Nonetheless, it is good to remember that the Formosa polls do not necessarily represent the mainstream conventional wisdom about the state of the race. Donovan Smith has put together a weighted polling average (similar to what I did four years ago) of various presidential polls, and you can see that the results are slightly different from the Formosa results.
(Aside: Since Taiwan News is no longer a dominant English-language media source for info on Taiwan, you might not be aware of Donovan’s excellent work. Donovan has done a tremendous job of reporting all the twists and turns of the election this year. If you haven’t been following him, you should go to the Taiwan News website. and search for his name (Courtney Donovan Smith). You could do a lot worse things with your time than spending a few hours reading everything he’s written this year.)
Formosa is currently doing two different series of polls. They do a monthly poll on the general state of politics. This is the poll that has been going on since December 2018, and I have discussed it many times in the past. In addition, they are also doing a rolling sample on the presidential race. Every day since mid-July (except on weekends and holidays) they do 400 interviews, and they combined the most recent three days to get a sample size of 1200. This means that each day is 2/3 the same sample as the previous day, but every three days there is an entirely new sample.
A look at the monthly polls shows only a few big shifts over the past year. Lai has consistently had about 35%. He’s gone up and down a little bit, but for the most part, he has been very steady. The first big shift was right after last year’s local elections when Hou surged in popularity. He was 5% ahead of Lai in the December 2022 poll, and this seems to have been the critical period in which the KMT decided that Hou was going to be their presidential candidate. After all, he had just smashed the DPP in local elections, and he looked like a potential winner in the presidential race. In addition, none of the other KMT figures who wanted to run for president (read: Chu) had similarly high polling numbers. Unfortunately for the KMT, Hou’s high polling numbers proved to be ephemeral. For most of the first half of 2023, he was consistently in the high 20s and clearly behind Lai. Nevertheless, he was in second place solidly ahead of Ko, who was consistently around 20%. The race in April 2023 looked a lot like it had looked in the summer of 2022.
Things shifted dramatically in May 2023 when Ko suddenly rose from trailing Hou by 4% in the April to leading by him by 8%. The main numbers were shocking to everyone, but numerous subsequent polls confirmed the change in the pecking order. After May, Ko was in second place. Hou had been relegated to third, which I need not remind you is a terrible place to be in a three-way race. Since that shock in May, the KMT campaign has been all about trying to consolidate their traditional base. Hou has wholeheartedly embraced almost all of the policies from former president Ma and has not made many overtures to the non-KMT sympathizers who powered his erstwhile high polling numbers. The KMT has made a certain amount of headway in this regard. The September 2023 poll showed Hou and Ko basically tied, though this is due as much to a drop in Ko’s support as it is to a rise in Hou’s.
Again, it is worth remembering that the Formosa polls are generally more favorable to Hou that other polls. Most other polls still show Ko in second place, though not always by a large margin.
The daily tracking polls tell basically the same story. Lai has usually been around 35%, sometimes as much as 40%. Since about mid-August, Hou and Ko have been jockeying for second place with neither one clearly having an advantage.
The most recent data (#54 was conducted Oct 16-18) shows somewhat better results for the blue camp a bit worse for the green camp. I’ll keep my eye on that to see if that’s a real trend or just a statistical blip.
Overall, it has been a fairly stable race. No one has skyrocketed upward or plummeted downward. Most shifts have been within a few percentage points of the previous poll.
The party ID numbers look fairly stable, too. Over the last four years, the DPP has usually had between 25 and 30% support. The KMT has gone up and down a little bit more, but it has generally been somewhere around 15 to 20%. The biggest change has been for the TPP, which did not exist five years ago. The TPP is slowly built its support to about 10%. In May, when Ko surged in the polls, the TPP also surged up to about 15%. However, as Ko has slid back to his previous levels, so has the TPP.
I keep talking about stability, but there is one number that gives me pause. In its monthly polls, Formosa asks respondents how they feel about the two major parties: Do they have good feelings or bad feelings toward each of the parties? Over the past several years (with the exception of the two months around the 2022 local elections), the DPP has consistently done much better than the KMT on these questions. For example, in March 2022, 49.8% had good feelings toward the DPP while 39.0% had bad feelings, a net positive rating of 10.8%. Meanwhile, 26.2% had good feelings toward the KMT while 59.0% had bad feelings, a net positive rating of -32.8%. Taken together, DPP had a 43.6% overall advantage on this question that month, one of four consecutive months in which the DPP had at least a 40% advantage. For most of 2023, the DPP’s advantage has been around 20%.
The September numbers are different. In August the DPP had a 27.0% advantage. In September, that shrank to only 10.1%. For perspective, the DPP net advantage in December 2019, the last monthly survey before the last national general election, was 34.7%. The difference didn’t come from the DPP numbers. The DPP has had net favorability rating of negative 2 or 3%for several months. However, the KMT went from a net favorability rating of -28.5% to only -13.2%. Only 48.4% of respondents expressed negative feelings towards the KMT. Other than the two months around the 2022 election, that’s the lowest negative percentage of negative feelings towards the KMT since April 2019, which was still in the heyday of the Han Wave. Apparently, something has shifted so that the population doesn’t have nearly as negative feelings towards the KMT as it previously did.
Why am I taking this number seriously and not just treating it as a probable statistical blip the way I normally treat unusual results? The thing is, the rest of this poll makes it clear that this wasn’t simply the result of a particularly good sample for the KMT. The KMT had some encouraging numbers, but the magnitude of this one stands out. Moreover, 40.0% of the respondents supported Lai in the presidential race, near the upper end of his usual range. This isn’t at all like those two months in late2022 where ALL the numbers were fantastic for the KMT and terrible for the DPP. If the presidential race were closer – as it was in the most recent tracking poll – you have to wonder whether the DPP’s longstanding advantage in emotional reactions would shrink even more.
These gut feelings probably don’t matter much for the portion of the electorate that has strong preferences. The people who can tell you which party they prefer or have clear preferences on specific policies will probably end up voting for who the side they have always supported. It’s the people without strong preferences who might matter. They are more likely to vote with their gut, and if their gut feelings are strongly negative about one of the two major parties, as they probably were in 2020 against Han and the KMT, they are likely to break solidly for the other side. In a more neutral environment, as 2024 seems to be, the DPP probably shouldn’t assume neutral voters will break so clearly for them again.
This might not matter in the presidential race, which seems on a solid path to a three-way race and a split opposition. However, it might be very important in many of the legislative races where the DPP won many marginal districts four years ago.
The biggest question in the presidential campaign thus far has been whether the opposition could coalesce around a single candidate. The polls seem to indicate that Lai has a healthy lead, but the opposition candidates could make it a close race if they can cooperate. I’ll look at the polling data in greater depth in another post, but for now let’s assume that the conventional wisdom is correct.
I’ve had my doubts the cooperation between the KMT and TPP is possible. For one thing, the two sides are fairly even in the polls, so it’s not obvious which side should yield to the other side.
For another, neither side seems interested at all in taking the number two spot on the ticket. Both seem to think that cooperation means the other side will cooperate with them, not that they will cooperate with the other side. The TPP has usually been a little bit ahead in the polls, so they naturally think that they should have a fair shot at the top spot on any joint ticket. Moreover, the second spot on a joint ticket would probably be a death sentence for their party. The only way Ko will be an influential person over the next four years is if he is either the president or the head of a party that controls the balance of power in the legislature. The TPP will have a hard time winning many of the 73 district seats. Their best chance to do well in the legislative elections is to win a lot of party list seats. If they can win 20 or 25% of the party list votes, they might win 7 to 10 party list seats, and that might be enough to determine the balance of power in the legislature. It will be a lot easier to ask voters to support the TPP on the party list if Ko is on the ballot running for president. If he is merely a vice presidential candidate, all the focus will be on the contest between the KMT and DPP and the TPP will be marginalized. Don’t expect to see presidential candidate Hou enthusiastically reminding voters to vote for the TPP on the party list.
On the KMT side, they seem to have assumed from the beginning that cooperation meant the KMT would get the top spot. Even when Hou clearly trailed Ko in the polls, the KMT kept talking about a Hou-Ko ticket. There is a clear political logic to this. In a majoritarian system like Taiwan’s, you never want to be the third party. Accepting Ko as the presidential candidate also means accepting the possibility that he could win and assemble a strong enough coalition to push the KMT into third place. (Even worse, he could turn out to be a closet Taiwan nationalist. KMT true believers still have nightmares about Lee Teng-hui.) The ideal KMT outcome seems to be the 2004 model, in which James Soong, who led a smaller party but was clearly more popular, deferred to far less charismatic Lien Chan. It’s worth remembering that even though they lost the 2004 election, the KMT bounced back to win in 2008 while the PFP faded into oblivion. Unfortunately for the KMT this time, Ko is a different animal than Soong. Song was a true believer in the ROC church, and he placed a high value on defeating the DPP, even at the cost of his personal and partisan fortunes. Ko is not motivated by a similar drive to “save” the ROC. He is much more focused on gaining power for himself rather than defeating somebody else. His calls to throw the DPP out of power are a means to an end, not the end itself.
My skepticism about the feasibility of a blue-white coalition aside, the two sides have taken significant steps over the last few days to discuss the possibility of cooperation. Yesterday, King Pu-tsung, who is running Hou’s campaign, had a high-profile meeting with Huang Shan-shan, who is running Ko’s campaign. My question was, were they sincerely trying to find a mode of cooperation, or was this merely political theater?
Remember, candidates formally register between November 20th and 24th, so time is of the essence. Long, drawn out negotiations are not an option. They need a quick agreement that can be implemented in short order.
The TPP’s proposal was fairly simple. The joint candidate would be determined entirely by opinion polls. Five pollsters would pit Hou and Ko directly against Lai, and the one with the highest average would be named the candidate. Half the interviews would be conducted by landline, and the other half would be done by cell phone. This is basically the procedure the DPP used four years ago to settle the nomination fight between Tsai and Lai. Not coincidentally, this is also the most advantageous procedure for Ko, something that becomes more obvious when you contrast it with the KMT’s very, very different proposal.
The KMT proposed holding a “democratic primary,” which it claimed was the long-standing practice in the USA, France, and South Korea. Voting stations would be set up either in the 22 cities and counties or the 73 legislative districts. Anyone would be eligible to vote, but they would have to sign a pledge of loyalty to certain ideals and they would have to present their ID card.
This system would be tremendously advantageous to the KMT. The TPP has almost no national organization and could not possibly put together such a complex mechanism in so little time, so the entire process would inevitably be organized and run by the KMT. The TPP would just have to trust that the KMT was not bending the rules to its advantage. The primary itself would be a contest of voter mobilization, and this also plays into the KMT’s advantages. The KMT has local organizations everywhere who can bring their local networks of (mostly older) voters to the voting booth, organizing transportation (and “incentives”) if necessary. The TPP, in contrast, would have to rely entirely on self-mobilization by their (mostly younger) supporters. It’s not hard to imagine a few young people on Gogoros being swamped by legions of voters getting off charter buses from every corner of Hsinchu or Pingtung Counties. The loyalty pledge and ID card might also discourage TPP supporters from participating. Remember, most TPP supporters don’t like either major party. They might not be enthusiastic about giving their personal information to a KMT party worker or pledging to support the KMT in the general election after the KMT inevitably won this “democratic” primary. To put it simply, this was not a proposal that the TPP could even consider, much less accept.
As if to hammer home the point this was not a good faith proposal, the KMT added one more comment. The reason for the ID card requirement was to ensure that no one stuffed the ballots 灌票. King Pu-tsung stated that shenanigans were far less likely to occur with the “democratic” primary than with opinion polls. Never mind that the KMT has used polling primaries many times in the past without worrying about this, and any fears that the other major party would support the weaker candidate have been repeatedly debunked. This was a clear effort to delegitimize polling and argue that their method of direct voting was more democratic, scientific, and legitimate.
The two sides are so far apart and the time is so short that it seems extremely unlikely they will find a mutually acceptable solution. All in all, this strikes me more as an effort to speak to their own bases – especially on the KMT side – than to actually consolidate the opposition forces. They want to be able to tell their loyal supporters that they tried to cooperate but the other side was unreasonable and obstinate. We seem headed for a three-way race, not a head-to-head contest between the DPP and the opposition.
The two sides did agree to hold three TV debates. We’ll see if those actually happen. If they do and the two sides are no closer to cooperating, it will be interesting to see if they spend more time and energy attacking each other or the DPP
I was watching one of the political talk shows on FTV, a deep green channel, a couple of weeks ago. They spent the entire time criticizing Ko Wen-je.
There were several different topics. The first one had to do with his mother’s house in Hsinchu. It has an illegal addition built onto the roof, and they have blocked the fire lane on the ground floor. His mother claimed that these additions were made 30 years ago, but a quick look at Google Earth pictures show that they date from six or seven or years ago. At that time, he was already Taipei mayor, and he was yelling passionately about tearing down any newly built illegal structures. The powers complained about the double standard with Ko passionately talking about public safety in Taipei city but ignoring his own mother blocking a fire lane with a metal fence.
The second topic had to do with the apparent alliance in Tainan between the TPP and former KMT member and legislative aspirant Lee Chuan-chiao. According to the talk show panelists, Lee is obviously and deeply corrupt. This alliance between the TPP and Lee shows what a blue-white coalition would look like in practice and just how little Ko cares about anti-corruption when it comes to his own personal interests.
The third topic wasn’t technically about Ko. It was about the corruption allegations swirling around Hsinchu mayor Alice Kao Hung-an, who has been accused of, among other things, accepting luxury cars and free luxury housing from various real estate developers. Kao is one of Terry Gou’s proteges, she is also one of the most prominent members of the TPP. This might not be an explicit attack on Ko just yet, but it will be soon: this is what you can expect to see if the TPP takes power nationally.
There were one or two other stories that I can’t quite remember. But the entire show was an extended attack on Ko and the TPP.
After the show as I was thinking about it, I realized I have seen this script before. The DPP is attacking Ko in exactly the same way they successfully attacked Han Kuo-yu four years ago. And it makes sense. While these two politicians are very different people, they share a few critical similarities. And this is what the DPP is trying to undermine.
Both Han and Ko have other bases of support, but what turned them into electoral forces to be reckoned with was their ability to supplement those bases with voters attracted to their populist appeal. Neither Han nor Ko fits the archetypical mold of a populist perfectly. Neither one makes scapegoating minorities a central pillar of their appeal. Ko doesn’t “perform the low,” saying and doing various crude things to make polite society cringe. And Ko hasn’t identified “the real people,” the way Han did with his shumin. But at its heart, populism is a moral argument against the ruling elite class. It tells people that the reason for their difficult lives is that the establishment has chosen to systematically siphon off society’s wealth. There should be enough to go around, but the corrupt elite politicians and their allies in society – and these are different groups in different flavors of populism – have intentionally stolen resources from the public. Both Han and Ko make versions of this populist argument.
I have written quite a bit about Han and his populous rhetoric, so I won’t rehash that here.
Most everything in Taiwan politics has its roots in the China cleavage, and Ko’s populist rhetoric is no exception. How to deal with China is the most pressing issue facing Taiwan, and the answers are usually grounded in people’s identity. KMT supporters generally have some sort of Chinese identity to go along with their Taiwanese identity, and they tend to think that Taiwan inevitably will – and should – have closer relations with China. DPP supporters tend to have exclusive Taiwanese identity, and they tend to think that Taiwan is better off keeping China at arm’s length and developing closer relations with the rest of the world. Ko wants to sidestep this question entirely. His answer is that the two big parties use “ideology” to manipulate the voters into supporting them. And if you vote on the basis of “ideology,” you really don’t have a choice. You either have to vote for the DPP or the KMT, no matter how lousy they are in office. This gives them free reign to be corrupt since their voters can’t go anywhere else. Ko tells his supporters to ignore this “ideology” and to vote for good governance instead. While he increasingly focuses his fire on the DPP these days – they are, after all, the governing party and more of his support increasingly comes from the opposition side – he does not often praise the KMT. In his vision, they are also part of the problem.
Where this rhetoric moves from standard third party complaints about big parties into populist territory is when he starts talking about what is to be done. For the most part, he doesn’t provide any specifics. In his view, good governance is a simple matter. You just have to do the “right” things. One of the phrases he says over and over is, “Do the right things; don’t do the wrong things; and work diligently” 對的事情做，不對的事情不要做，認真做. It’s just that easy. The problem is that the KMT and DPP often choose to do the wrong things, not do the right things, and they don’t work hard. They are morally flawed.
Barack Obama once said something to the effect of, “The president’s job is to make hard decisions, and all the decisions that get to the president’s desk are hard. All the easy ones were made a long time ago.” Ko is basically saying the opposite: the decisions are easy if you care first and foremost about the people. He is implicitly arguing he uniquely understands and represents the people and the popular will. If you disagree with him, it can only be because you’re corrupt and selfish. He is effectively denying the possibility that people legitimately disagree because they have different values or that some problems are complex and don’t have an obvious best solution.
So how do you undermine this message? It doesn’t seem to be very useful to argue against specific policies. That isn’t what attracts the voters in the first place. What attracts them is the feeling that someone who shares their values will be making decisions in their best interests. So the way to attack a populist is to convince the voters that he doesn’t actually share their values. Han Kuo-yu made a big deal of being a simple person who only needed a bowl of braised pork rice and a bottle of mineral water. When it emerged that he was dabbling in luxury real estate speculation, that severely damaged the image that he had worked so hard to build. Maybe he’s not just like us; maybe he is actually just another one of those corrupt officials that he complains about!
This is the narrative that the DPP is trying to build around Ko. He talks about right and wrong, but everywhere you turn you see double standards. He screams about not allowing any new, unsafe, illegal structures, but in his own personal life he is willing to look past not just an illegal structure but blatantly blocking off a fire lane. He says not to do the wrong things, but when it’s in his personal interest, he is happy to make an alliance with an obviously corrupt KMT politician. He guaranteed TPP nominees would be incorrupt, but look at the mayor of Hsinchu. And of course he doesn’t see anything wrong with anything she has done. It’s all very hypocritical. He isn’t actually making decisions for the ordinary people; he’s making them for himself.
It remains to be seen whether this strategy will work as well as it did four years ago. It’s worth remembering the Han was trying to overcome a big deficit in the distribution of national identity. Ko is not so clearly identified with Chinese identity, so he isn’t facing quite the same obstacle. And this is a three- or four-way race, so a lot of the people who have doubts about Ko are already supporting someone else.
Still, it’s interesting to me the the DPP has looked past all the dissimilarities with four years ago to identify the fundamental common challenge, and they seem to have chosen the exact same strategy to deal with it. I can’t say I think they’re making a mistake.
The Terry Gou campaign is entering a death spiral. It might be a fast death, or it might be a slow death, but this campaign is doomed.
Gou introduced his running mate a couple of days ago, and it was a disaster. His vice presidential choice is an actress, Tammy Lai Pei-hsia 賴佩霞. She studied at the Kennedy School of government and has a PhD in psychology from Jinan University (the one in China, not the one in Taiwan), but apparently she is best known for her role in a drama playing the president of Taiwan. (I don’t know; I’m illiterate when it comes to pop culture.)
In her remarks, she repeated several times that the Gou is way behind in the polls. This is not something you want to stress when you are becoming part of the campaign. She also told us that she doesn’t really like Taiwan’s politics, and she hadn’t paid much attention to politics here until Gou asked her to be his running mate in September. In case you haven’t looked at the calendar recently, it’s September right now. When reporters asked her what she would contribute to the campaign, she answered that she would keep Gou in a good mood, keeping his spirits up, and show the softer side of his personality. She said that when she accepted the offer, she told him, “We’re gonna have fun.” Great. Presidential campaigns’ top priority should be frivolity. She didn’t give any indication does she knows anything about politics, policy, governing, or anything else that a president might need to know.
One more thing, just after the news conference it emerged that she is a dual American citizen. Um, that’s not great. Maybe Gou forgot to ask? Maybe she is unaware American citizens can’t run for vice president of Taiwan?
Gou is a political outsider, but compared to Lai, he is an insider’s insider. I really wish one of the reporters had asked her, “The most important job of a vice president is to be ready to be the president. Gou is in good health right now, but he’s also 72 years old. You said you haven’t paid attention to politics until just recently, and you don’t have any experience in politics. Why should we expect that you are ready to become president at any moment?” Unfortunately, they were too polite to ask that question.
But the VP choice is not Gou’s worst problem right now. He has to put together a huge petition drive to get on the ballot. We all assumed that he would spread around a lot of money, and the local factions would take care of this problem for him. However, that doesn’t seem to be happening. Local factions seem to be maintaining their distance from the Gou campaign. The word on the street is that Gou is not throwing money around freely. Apparently, he will pay bills, but only at the same standard as he would in a normal business setting. That is, he wants to see all expenses documented, and he wants receipts for everything. Well, local factions don’t work that way. They don’t have accounting departments, and they certainly don’t document every last expense very carefully. A lot of their spending is in the gray areas of the law or outright illegal, and they don’t want it documented for everyone to see. They expect their funders to know this and will not to be too picky about exactly how the money was spent. Unlimited money is supposedly Gou’s trump card, but he’s not playing it. If you can’t make some money from Gou’s campaign, why in the world should you work for him? If he can’t manage to solve a small problem like this petition drive, he really isn’t qualified to be president.
Ko and Hou don’t talk about Gou very much these days; there is no need to actively kill him since he is doing it by himself. I expect they will soon start saying very nice and patronizing things about him in an attempt to woo his supporters as his campaign dies.
The only person who will miss Gou is Lai Ching-te. Lai has been talking for several weeks about how one of his opponents favors signing a peace agreement with China, and this would be the same as signing away Taiwan’s sovereignty. He never says who it is, so you’re free to imagine that it’s either Hou or Ko. When Gou drops out, he’ll have to figure out a new way to make this argument.
This might be the last time I write about Gou’s presidential campaign.
Frozen Garlic 