thoughts on the Taipei County campaign

[note: I apologize for the rambling nature of this post.  However, it does reflect the muddled nature of my thinking on this subject.  And I feel the need to post something, since I have been quiet for such a long time.]

 

I’ve been trying to think about the mayoral race in Xinbei City, and I think I have some ideas about what each side is trying to do and what assumptions underlie those strategies.  I also think I don’t buy most of those assumptions.

Taipei County is something of an urban city overlaid on the foundation of a rural society.  Like Taipei City, there is a highly dense and fluid population.  Mobility is important, because when lots of people are moving in and out, they don’t have as many ties with local organizations and can’t be mobilized by traditional networks.  The best way to reach these unattached voters is through the media campaign.

However, Taipei County also has a different side.  In the 1950s and 1960s, Taipei County was a relatively small county, with a population much smaller than Chiayi, Yunlin, or Changhua Counties.  Its politics were arranged around local factions.  However, unlike most counties, Taipei County never developed county-wide factions.  Instead, the factions were all based at the township level.  So Banqiao had the Liu, Guo, and Haishan factions, Danshui had the Mai and Chen factions, Zhonghe had the Jiang-Lin and Lu-You factions, Yonghe had the Big Chen and Little Chen factions, and so on.  Even the small towns, like Wugu, Ruifang, and Shulin had their own local factions.  The critical point is that these factions never formed permanent alliances with each other, so that Taipei County developed a bewildering array of largely independent factions.  When the Taipei County population boom started in the 1970s, some of these factions faded away, their local networks swamped by the huge numbers of outsiders.  Others managed to survive and even thrive by somehow building ties to all these new immigrants and incorporating them into the factional networks.  So even today, urban Taipei County rests upon this more rural architecture.

In the past twenty years, most of the county executive races can be explained by reference to what the local factions did.  In 1989, the KMT nominated a NTU professor, and many of the local factions were not pleased.  The DPP’s narrow victory was attributed to the lack of cooperation from local factions.  In 1993, the KMT nominated a Sanchong faction member, and, again, many other local factions refused to support him.  He lost badly.  In 1997, most of the KMT factions supported the KMT nominee, but two local faction candidates ran independent campaigns and took just enough votes away for the DPP to eke out a narrow victory.  In 2001, Su Zhenchang won his re-election campaign in part because he had spent much of his first term building up good relations with lots of local organizations.  I wouldn’t say that he made friends with the factions per se, but he did steal away a significant amount of the support that the factions would normally be able to mobilize on behalf of the KMT.  It didn’t help that his opponent was Wang Jianxuan, a politician with a reputation for incorruptibility.  Factions probably didn’t see too much benefit in going all out for him.  In 2005, the KMT finally unified all the various factions around its candidate, and won easily.  Of course, there are other explanations for all these outcomes, but the faction-centered explanations aren’t easy to dismiss, especially from the KMT’s point of view.

So I think that the central assumptions of the KMT campaign are these.  First, Taipei County has fundamentally a blue-leaning electorate.  If everyone votes their party identity, the KMT should win.  The DPP only wins when it steals some KMT votes or the KMT vote is split.  Zhu Lilun does not need to win any DPP votes; he just needs to turn out his base.  Second, the way to turn out the base is to maintain good relations with all the local factions and various local networks and organizations.  There really is no need to engage the DPP in a media campaign.  He just needs to protect all the local networks, and he will win.  As a result, the Zhu campaign to this point has been all about meeting with locally important people.  And since the Cai Yingwen campaign hasn’t showed much inclination to try to horn in on this territory, Zhu has to be feeling pretty good right now.

I don’t like these assumptions very much.  The factions collectively matter, but I don’t think they are sufficient.  My guess is that they can turn about 10% of the total votes in one direction or another.  The KMT needs all or almost all of that 10%, but I doubt that this will be sufficient.  The KMT also has its base of loyal party voters who will turn out for the KMT regardless of what the local factions do.  However, I’m concerned that the KMT is ignoring a vital part of its potential coalition.  There are many voters who lean to the KMT and would probably vote for the KMT if they bothered to vote.  However, unlike the Zhu campaign, I would not assume that you can turn out all of them through local organizations.  Taipei County still has lots of people who are not plugged into any organizational networks.  The way to get these people to the polls is by raising the temperature of the campaign.  You have to get them excited so that they will mobilize themselves.  Zhu doesn’t seem to be doing anything for them.  I wonder if his campaign will be undone by a low turnout rate.  He might get all the loyal KMT votes, all the faction votes, and still lose.

 

The DPP campaign is hard to figure out.  Cai Yingwen seems to be spending all of her time visiting traditional markets.  (Note: exaggeration.)  She doesn’t seem to be trying to attack any of the local networks that Zhu Lilun is working so hard at cultivating.  I’m also getting a distinct feeling that she just isn’t working very hard at all, at least by the standards of most candidates.  I’ve traveled with a few candidates for a day, and the pace they keep up is generally stupendous.  I’m exhausted by mid-afternoon.  I’m getting a general impression (and I can’t cite anything in particular) that Cai Yingwen simply isn’t willing to live that kind of all-consuming campaign life.  Look, politics is difficult.  The winners are akin to professional athletes; they are at the very pinnacle of their profession.  This is Cai Yingwen’s first real campaign test, and she simply might be out of her league.  (And for those who think she is really concentrating on the 2012 presidential election, don’t imagine that that campaign would be any less demanding or that she also wouldn’t have to cultivate lots of grassroots power brokers.)

I’m also wondering about Cai’s media strategy.  She hasn’t gotten much press coverage at all, partly because she has decided to run a positive campaign.  Positive platitudes just aren’t very interesting, and policy positions in the middle of a campaign are cheap.  Of course the media is ignoring her.  This would be ok if she were cruising to an easy victory, but most polls show that she is losing.  One problem is that she isn’t winning enough of the swing voters because Zhu has an image as a capable administrator.  Now, I don’t have any idea whether Zhu is or is not a capable administrator, but I am sure that he will retain this image unless Cai decides to challenge it.  Zhu has a track record of about eight years from Taoyuan County, and I wonder if the Cai campaign has decided that voters in Taipei County don’t want to hear about Taoyuan.  The thing is, all these images are very shallow and could be changed dramatically with a bit of information.  We really don’t know anything about the Taoyuan experience (and Zhu isn’t trumpeting his triumphs there either), so one or two clear examples of bad administration might severely damage his reputation as a capable administrator.  I think that would go a long way to reducing his appeal to all the independent voters (who he isn’t courting very energetically anyway).

 

So right now I’m not terribly impressed with either candidate.  Both are courting their base almost exclusively.  Neither is projecting much of a dynamic image.  If nothing changes, turnout will probably be quite low.  The KMT will probably win because its base is slightly bigger than the DPP’s (though the margin is smaller than they seem to think).  However, both are leaving themselves wide open to defeat.  By ignoring the floating voters, Zhu is betting everything on the idea that his base will carry him to victory.  (Hey, it isn’t 2006 or 2008 anymore!  The gap between the parties is a lot smaller in 2010.  It’s a lot closer to the 2004 balance.)  Cai seems unwilling to follow Su Zhenchang’s strategy of ripping away some of the KMT’s organizational strength, and she doesn’t seem willing to engage Zhu directly in the media.

This will probably change over the last six weeks of the campaign.  Sooner or later, we will start seeing big rallies and appeals to all the undecided voters.  And maybe I’m missing a lot because I haven’t seen it reported in the news.  But so far (and so far as I can tell), I don’t like the choices that either campaign is making.

 

Pressure mounts on Cai to run

The DPP mayoral nomination process for the other three cities has entered its final stages.  It was supposed to be done last week, but the DPP gave itself a one week extension.

There’s not much doubt that the DPP will nominate Su Zhenchang 蘇貞昌 for Taipei City, but the other two nominations are still very much in the air.  There is a strong push being made to shove aside the two obvious candidates, You Xikun 游錫堃 and Lin Jialong 林佳龍, in favor of the two top party leaders, Chair Cai Yingwen 蔡英文 and Secretary-General Su Jiaquan 蘇嘉全.  Neither Cai nor Su really wants to run, but they are under immense pressure to accept the nominations.  Cai threw Su under the bus first, calling on him to run in Taichung City a couple of weeks ago.  Yesterday, Su returned the favor, saying his campaign would only have direction if Cai were also to run.  (Funny, I thought they were supposed to be allies!)  For the first time in a couple of months, I am getting the feeling that Cai and Su will have to yield to the pressure and accept the nominations.

Why don’t they want to run?  There are a few common reasons.  Both seem quite happy in their present offices.  Both would be outsiders running a campaign without deep local connections and only six months to develop local credibility.  Neither has prepared at all for this campaign.  In Cai’s case, she wants to remain in national politics, with her eye on national issues such as relations with China, national security, the economy, and so forth.  Becoming mayor of Xinbei City would give her electoral experience and some experience in local government, but it would also force her to spend time on local government problems, like picking up garbage, enforcing parking regulations, and maintaining parks.  Cai has a chance to be the party presidential candidate in 2012, and I think her eye is firmly fixed on that opportunity.  Local governance is a distraction to preparation for that race.  Besides, she might lose this election.  Polls show her even with Zhu Lilun 朱立倫, not with a big lead.  For Su, the probability of losing is very high.  His job would be to lose as well as possible, hardly an attractive mission for someone who is already established in national politics.  Moreover, since no one wants to back a losing horse, Su probably wouldn’t be able to raise money easily.

Since they don’t want to run, why does everyone else want them to?  In a word, the alternatives are lousy.  In Taichung City, Lin Jialong has been running for more than five years, and is still nowhere in the polls.  He already lost by a convincing margin to Jason Hu 胡志強 once, and there is very little reason to believe it would be any better this time.  The other local candidates, such as Guo Junming 郭俊銘 and Qiu Taisan 邱太三, have even worse prospects.  In Xinbei City, the situation is perhaps even more desperate.  The DPP is mostly resigned to losing Taichung, but they think they should win Xinbei.  At the beginning of the year, the KMT was saddled with a lousy incumbent, Zhou Xiwei 周錫瑋, and both Su Zhenchang and Cai Yingwen were leading him in the polls.  Since then, Zhou has withdrawn from the race in favor of Zhu Lilun, Su opted to run in Taipei City, and Cai doesn’t want to run.  What looked like a likely victory for the DPP has turned into a likely defeat.  As in Taichung, the other potential nominees aren’t appealing.  Former Premier You Xikun has emerged as the strongest of the bunch, but he still trails Zhu in the polls but a wide margin, as much as 20%.  At this point, the most likely outcome of a You candidacy would be something like a 55-45 defeat: respectable, but a clear defeat nonetheless.  If the DPP wants to win, they probably need Cai Yingwen.

One thing this illustrates to me is just what a tough game electoral politics is.  If you look like a loser, you will be cast aside.  Lin Jialong has been working hard for five years, but since he has little in the way of public support, the DPP won’t hesitate to push him aside if there is any better option.  You Xikun has had six months to prove that he could win the Xinbei race.  There hasn’t been much movement in the polls.  Well, he had his shot, and now it’s time to look for someone else.  The KMT was desperately trying to do the same thing in the Kaohsiung and Tainan races.  The difference is that they never found any better options.  Even Wang Jinping 王金平 didn’t look like he would win Kaohsiung, and Wang is such an effective Speaker that they party can hardly afford to sacrifice him for a few extra percentage points.  The DPP has better options in Cai and Su.  Cai is clearly more popular than You and is even with Zhu.  Su is only even with Lin, but that makes him a far better vehicle for the DPP.  Su hasn’t even started to develop a campaign yet; he can only go up.  No voter is going to re-evaluate things with a Hu-Lin matchup.  With a brand new face in the race, there is a chance that voters will take a fresh look, not only at the DPP side, but also at Jason Hu and his record.

I’m not sure that nominating Cai and Su helps the DPP in the long run, especially for the 2012 presidential race.  However, it would clearly make them stronger in this year’s elections.