Despite a stagnant approval rating, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) is still the preferred president over Hon Hai Precision Industry Co chairman Terry Gou (郭台銘) and New Taipei City Mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫), while the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has a comfortable lead over the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in voter preference, an opinion poll released yesterday showed.
The poll pitted Tsai against the KMT’s Chu and Gou for the 2020 presidential election, with 37.6 percent of respondents saying they would vote for Tsai, 30.1 percent favoring Gou and 15.3 percent for Chu, the Taiwan Style Foundation poll showed.
However, Tsai trailed Guo among voters who identified as pan-blue or neutral, with 30.6 percent of politically neutral respondents saying they would vote for Guo and 16.4 percent for Tsai.
Photo: CNA
Asked if Gou could win the presidency over Tsai in a one-on-one election as a KMT candidate — as was suggested in an opinion poll by the Chinese-language China Times earlier this month — foundation executive officer Anson Hung (洪耀南) said it would make the race a bipartisan competition and voters would be more likely to vote according to their party identification, with both the DPP and the KMT able to consolidate their voter base.
If Gou was changed to Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) as the non-partisan candidate competing with Tsai and Chu, 31.9 percent of respondents would vote for Tsai, 25.8 percent for Chu and 21.8 percent for Ko.
The DPP also led as the public’s preferred plotical party, with the New Power Party (NPP) overtaking the KMT as the second-most favored party, the polled showed.
The poll showed that 39.4 percent of respondents gave the DPP a favorable opinion rating, while 32.7 percent had a negative opinion and 23.2 percent were indifferent.
The NPP was viewed favorably by 30.3 percent and negatively by 33.4 percent of the respondents, with 29.8 percent being indifferent.
The KMT was viewed favorably by 25.2 percent and negatively by 37.5 percent, with 31.7 percent indifferent, while 51.4 percent said they were indifferent toward the People First Party, with 23.9 percent having a good impression and 19.4 percent a negative impression of the party.
Of those who said they would vote in the next year’s special municipality and county commissioner elections, 33.9 percent said they would vote for the DPP, 23.5 percent would vote for the KMT and 13.5 percent for independent candidates.
Tsai’s approval rating stands at 54 percent, with a 39.7 percent disapproval rating, while 52.9 percent of the respondents were dissatisfied with her performance and 41.3 percent were satisfied.
Meanwhile, former vice president Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) was ahead of the other candidates in the KMT’s chairperson election with 22.3 percent support, closely followed by KMT Vice Chairman Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) at 21.8 percent and KMT Chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) at 21.2 percent.
Dissatisfaction with Tsai remains high as people either disapprove of the pace and scale of reforms or disapprove of the reforms entirely, DPP Legislator Wang Ding-yu (王定宇) said.
“That Chu has less support than Gou suggests a structural change in the pan-blue camp, because voters prefer [an unconventional figure] over a traditional KMT politician,” DPP Legislator Pasuya Yao (姚文智) said.
In the constituencies of Taipei, New Taipei City and Keelung, the KMT is still the most favored party with a 27.4 percent support rating, but it is closely followed by the DPP with 26.7 percent, with independent candidates — in particular, Ko — trailing with 17.2 percent.
With the KMT’s lead minimized, the DPP should consider fielding its own candidate for Taipei mayor instead of forgoing the election to make way for Ko, DPP legislators said.
The poll was conducted from Saturday to Monday with 1,271 valid samples and a 2.75 percentage point margin of error.
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