KMT supporters mostly vote for individual candidates rather than a party. When splits appear between KMT politicians, the party’s supporters also split, weakening official candidates and mavericks alike. Special circumstances apart, KMT politicians who can’t work together would generally lose to their DPP rivals. DPP supporters, in contrast, mostly vote for their party, not for individuals.
Even when two rival pan-green candidates stand in an election, supporters will flock to the stronger one. In other words, with the DPP, both victory and defeat are complete and absolute. Whoever wins DPP primaries needn’t worry about the runners-up, unlike the KMT, where those who win primaries need to garner their rivals’ support or they’ll face a split vote and defeat at the polls.
In the run-up to the last mayoral elections in 2006, Taiwan Solidarity Union candidate Lo Chih-ming (羅志明), looking for a dignified way to back out of the Kaohsiung City race, expressed his willingness to negotiate with the DPP, but people in the DPP decided that it would be enough to rely on voters dumping the smaller party’s candidate and voting for their own, so they turned down Lo’s offer.
As it turned out, they were indeed able to elbow Lo out of the way, but Lo’s re-emergence in the following legislative election caused a DPP candidate to lose in an electoral district where the party should have won. In the current mayoral elections, the campaign teams of the official DPP candidates — those who won the primaries — are again intent on crushing the runners-up.
The DPP’s infighting is not as fierce in other places as it is in Tainan and Kaohsiung. The reason why it is so intense in those two places is precisely that the DPP’s position there is so strong, so anyone it nominates is almost certain to be elected.
If the DPP wins all five mayoral posts in the upcoming municipal elections and its supporters draw the mistaken conclusion that the party is guaranteed to win the 2012 presidential poll, then infighting could be so bad when the time comes that the party’s campaign crumbles without the KMT having to lift a finger.
Chen Mao-hsiung is a retired National Sun Yat-sen University professor.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
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