The odds of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) winning re-election in 2012 continued to drop after this week’s cross-strait talks, while the trust index for Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) continued to rise, reaching more than 50 percent this month, polls showed yesterday.
The Center for Prediction Market at National Chengchi University said on a scale from NT$0 to NT$100, the probability of Ma winning re-election was, according to bidders, NT$45.3.
Prediction markets are speculative exchanges, with the value of an asset meant to reflect the likelihood of a future event.
On Dec. 6, the figure fell below NT$50 for the first time since May, losing 2.3 percentage points in a day after Ma, who doubles as Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman, said his party had not performed as well as hoped in the “three-in-one” elections.
The KMT won 12 of the 17 mayor and commissioner posts up for grabs earlier this month, but its total percentage of votes fell 2 percentage points from 2005 to 47.88 percent of votes nationwide.
Since the center opened the trading on Ma’s re-election chances on April 11, prices have largely hovered around NT$60, but jumped to NT$70 in mid-June.
The figure then fell to NT$51.80 in August after Typhoon Morakot lashed Taiwan, killing hundreds.
Since Ma took over as KMT chairman, the center said the number had steadily declined from NT$58 on Nov. 18 to NT$50.80 on Dec. 5.
The figure fell below NT$50 after the local elections and fell further yesterday.
Meanwhile, a separate poll said voters’ confidence in Tsai stood at 51.8 percent this month, up 5.6 percent from last month and outperforming Ma’s 43.5 percent.
The poll released by Chinese-language Global Views magazine found that the DPP’s trust index was also higher than the KMT’s this month — the first time since the KMT returned to power in May last year.
That DPP’s trust index was 41.2 percent — a record high since the center began conducting its polls in June 2006 — compared with 40.6 percent for the KMT.
The pollster said the KMT’s decline had a lot to do with the way the administration handled the global economic downturn and its poor governance. The two factors combined contributed to public apprehension.
“In other words, the immediate problem facing the administration is not the presidential election in 2012,” it said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching