Taoyuan County Commissioner John Wu (吳志揚) has a 23-point lead over his opponent in the run-up to the Nov. 29 local elections, according to survey results released yesterday.
Forty-eight percent of voters in the county are supporting Wu, a member of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), in his bid to become the first mayor of Taoyuan when it is elevated to a special municipality in December, according to a poll conducted by the United Daily News.
That compares with 25 percent in favor of Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦), a former information minister who is representing the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
Another 25 percent of voters remain undecided, while just 1 percent supports a third candidate — Hsu Rui-chih (許睿智).
The election in Taoyuan is shaping up as a rematch of the 2009 vote, in which Wu beat Cheng with 52 percent of the vote.
Wu, 45, is the son of KMT stalwart Wu Po-hsiung (吳伯雄), whose long political career includes stints as Taipei mayor, interior minister and KMT chairman.
The poll indicates that Wu’s chances of winning the election have not been affected by a corruption scandal involving his deputy, Yeh Shih-wen (葉世文), who has been detained since July on charges of taking bribes from a major construction company.
In addition to indicating a voting trend in Wu’s favor, the survey also shows that 66 percent of poll respondents in Taoyuan believe that Wu will be elected, compared with only 8 percent who expect Cheng to win.
A total of 1,071 randomly selected adult residents in Taoyuan were interviewed last week for the poll, which had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percent, the paper said.
The Taoyuan mayoral race is part of the nine-in-one local elections to be held around the nation, that are set to lay the foundations for the 2016 presidential and legislative elections.
The race in Taoyuan — with a population of more than 2 million — is important because it is an election the KMT cannot afford to lose.
Of the nation’s six municipalities, soon to include Taoyuan, the KMT currently controls Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan and Taichung, whereas the DPP holds Greater Tainan and Greater Kaohsiung.
With both DPP incumbents expected to win reelection, any gain in the four other municipalities will be a boost to the opposition and a blow to the KMT.
A similar United Daily News poll released two days earlier showed that, in Taipei, independent candidate Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) had a 13-point advantage over Sean Lien (連勝文), who is seeking to keep the city for the KMT after Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) steps down in December.
A poll by the newspaper on New Taipei City showed that incumbent Mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫) has a similar advantage to Wu — 49 percent to 26 percent — with about 67 percent of voters in the city expecting Chu to win another four-year term.
Only 9 percent believe his opponent Yu Shyi-kun , a former premier, will win.
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:
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