Public opinion polls released yesterday showed huge differences between results, with one showing the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) presidential tickets running neck-and-neck, while another suggested a margin of difference of about 20 percentage points.
The opinion polls were conducted after DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) on Friday announced the choice of DPP Secretary-General Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全) as her running mate for the January presidential election.
The DPP’s poll showed 44 percent of respondents supporting the pairing of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) with Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義), while 43.6 percent supported Tsai and Su, DPP polling center director Chen Chun-lin (陳俊麟) said. Tsai’s support rate among those who expressed a strong likelihood of voting led Ma’s by 2.4 percent, Chen added.
In the same poll, 50.9 percent of respondents said Su’s selection was a plus for Tsai, while only 32.3 percent said Wu would be a good complement for Ma’s re-election bid.
In the survey, 56.8 percent of respondents said they liked Su as a vice-presidential candidate, while 40.2 percent preferred Wu. However, 46.7 percent of respondents said they disliked Wu, Chen said.
The poll collected 967 samples and has a 3.2 percent margin of error. Half of the samples were mobile phone users, Chen said, as a lot of people were traveling to their hometowns ahead of the Mid-Autumn Festival long weekend when the poll was conducted.
Meanwhile, a poll conducted by the Chinese-language China Times showed that 44 percent of its respondents supported the Ma-Wu ticket, 10 percentage points higher than the Tsai-Su ticket.
If People First Party Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) enters the race, Ma would still lead Tsai by 7 percentage points, with Soong receiving 14 percent of support, the survey showed.
Su would be a plus, according to 26 percent of those polled by the China Times, with 38 percent saying the selection of Su as Tsai’s running mate would not have an impact on her campaign.
The China Times’ survey collected 1,013 samples and has a 3.1 percent margin of error.
However, a poll by the Chinese-language Apple Daily showed the Tsai-Su ticket enjoying a substantial lead over the Ma-Wu ticket, with 51.3 percent against 30.7 percent, while 13.3 percent of respondents were undecided.
The Apple Daily polled 466 valid responses.
Ma’s campaign office yesterday accused the DPP of manipulating polls for electoral purposes and said the KMT would not publish polls it conducted.
“Unlike the DPP, which always uses its polls as a campaign tool, the KMT only uses internal polls for our own reference,” Ma’s campaign office spokesperson Ma Wei-kuo (馬瑋國) said.
She said the KMT’s surveys have shown the Ma-Wu ticket steadily leading the polls against the Tsai-Su pairing, but the party would not make public the exact poll results for campaign purposes.
KMT spokesperson Lai Su-ju (賴素如) said the KMT took any poll results as a reference, but would not change its campaign strategies because of ups and downs in support for Ma and Wu.
Additional reporting by Mo Yan-chih
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