A survey conducted by the campaign office of People First Party Taipei City Councilor Vivian Huang (黃珊珊) showed that more than 70 percent of potential voters in the Neihu-Nangang (內湖-南港) constituency identify themselves as being neutral toward the Jan. 16 elections, with respondents saying that they would vote for legislative candidates they most relate to rather than for certain political parties.
Huang, who is running for the Neihu-Nangang legislative seat, has been named a member of the Capital City Progressive Alliance (首都進步大聯盟), which was jointly established by Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) and the Democratic Progressive Party to challenge candidates nominated by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
Ko’s former campaign executive director, Yao Li-ming (姚立明), said the survey, which he helped design, was conducted at Ko’s behest to obtain insight into how voters’ political orientations have changed since the nine-in-one local elections in November last year, particularly neutral voters’ representation in the area’s constituency.
Yao touted the methodology employed in the survey, saying that it is considered the most advanced among survey companies in Western countries and cost five times as much as ordinary surveys.
The survey collected 2,300 valid samples via telephone interviews and 500 via the Internet, Yao said, adding that the online polls were conducted to boost the accuracy of the survey, as many people do not bother answering calls from telephone numbers they do not recognize.
Regarding the survey’s accuracy, Yao said that it attempted to infer whether respondents voted for Ko last year through nine specially designed questions, comparing the percentage of respondents thought to have voted for Ko with the percentage of votes he won to obtain a margin of error of only 1.5 percent.
The results indicated that the demographic of voters had undergone an even more drastic change than it had during last year’s elections, and that the number of people who identify themselves as neutral has increased from 60 percent to more than 70 percent, Yao said.
This means more people are willing to vote for candidates they most relate to, rather than for a certain political party, Yao said.
The results also showed that Huang was leading in Neihu-Nangang with an approval rating of 38.8 percent, compared with second-placed KMT Taipei City Councilor Lee Yan-hsiu’s (李彥秀) 23.5 percent.
Both candidates have received roughly the same amount of publicity, the survey found.
Huang said that, if elected, she would seek to break the barriers of bipartisanism to solicit support from voters across the political spectrum, and vowed to care for all voters in her constituency, regardless of their political affiliation.
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