Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taichung mayoral candidate Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) is leading Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Taichung Mayor Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) by 6.5 percentage points, according to an opinion poll released on Friday by a KMT think tank.
Asked who they would select if voting was the next day, 40.1 percent of respondents said they favored Lu, 33.6 percent said they favored Lin, 1.7 percent said they favored independent candidate Sung Yuan-tung (宋原通) and 24.6 percent were undecided, the poll found.
Asked if they liked Lu, 39 percent say they did, while 15.6 percent said they did not, compared with 33.7 percent who said they liked Lin and 31 percent who said they did not, it showed.
Photo: Liao Yao-tung, Taipei Times
A total of 38.6 percent of respondents said they were satisfied with Lin’s performance, while 36.2 percent said they were dissatisfied, it showed.
Meanwhile, 60.8 percent said they were displeased with President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) performance, while 20 percent said they approved of it, the poll showed.
Almost half — 48.7 percent — said the Taichung mayoral election is a bellwether and gives them a chance to vent their frustration with the ruling party, while 29.4 percent of respondents disagreed with the statement.
The survey was conducted by Television Broadcasts Satellite at the behest of the National Policy Foundation between Sept. 19 and Sept. 30 among 2,533 Taichung residents who were eligible to vote. It has a margin of error of 1.9 percentage points.
Speaking at a news conference held by the foundation in Taipei, National Open University professor Jack Lee (李允傑) said a series of opinion polls released by the media early last month showed Lin and Lu were neck-to-neck, as Lu’s lead was within the margin of error.
However, that is no longer true, as the foundation’s poll shows, Lee said.
Lin has been embroiled in a number of controversies, including his scrapping of the city’s bus rapid transit system — which reportedly made commuting in Taichung more inconvenient — and the drastically increased budget for producing passes for the Taichung Flora Exposition, which rose from NT$110 million (US$3.56 million) to NT$380 million, Lee said.
Conversely, Lu has shown resolve in improving the city’s air quality and has taken advantage of her joint campaign activities with KMT New Taipei City mayoral candidate Hou You-yi (侯友宜) and KMT Kaohsiung mayoral candidate Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), with the three capitalizing on air pollution issues to launch effective attacks on DPP energy policy, Lee said.
This has bolstered support for Lu, he 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