Election season has entered the final 30-day stretch. Judging from public opinion polls published over the past few days, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Alex Tsai’s (蔡正元) claims that Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) engaged in land speculation in Taipei’s Neihu District (內湖) have not been effective. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Eric Chu (朱立倫) continues to trail Tsai Ing-wen and the presidential election seems to be a done deal.
However, since the presidential and legislative elections are to take place on the same day, the presidential vote is expected to affect the legislative vote, and if Chu is trounced, that could have a crushing effect on many of the KMT’s legislative candidates.
In order to fight the positive effect that a Tsai Ing-wen victory might have on DPP legislative candidates, KMT candidates branched out on their own paths at an early stage, distancing themselves from Chu.
Posters of legislators together with Chu are absent from billboards and the KMT party emblem has even disappeared from printed materials. Furthermore, when campaigning through local vote captains, they openly say that voters can “vote for Tsai for president and candidate X for legislator.”
Given that the general election climate is not favorable for the KMT, the real question is: Will splitting the vote prevent the presidential vote from affecting the legislative vote?
Looking at the results of the eighth legislative elections in 2012, there are successful examples to be found. Four years ago, some KMT legislative candidates in central and southern Taiwan adopted that strategy, and they were elected.
For example, in Yunlin County’s first district, Tsai Ing-wen received 102,616 votes, while President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) garnered 75,431 votes — a clear victory margin of 27,185 votes. Despite that, the KMT’s Chang Chia-chun (張嘉郡) defeated the DPP’s Lee Chin-yung (李進勇).
Another example is Chiayi County’s first district, where Tsai Ing-wen received 87,448 votes to Ma’s 61,019, giving her an advantage of 26,429 votes. Despite that, the KMT’s Wong Chung-chun (翁重鈞) still managed to defeat the DPP’s Tsai Yi-yu (蔡易餘).
However, those two districts are probably exceptions. Wong is a veteran Chiayi politician and Chang’s family has dominated Yunlin, while it was the first time their opponents ran in those districts. This meant that the DPP lacked the foundations to build grassroots support, which made the split vote more apparent.
Analysis of the 73 electoral districts shows that votes for presidential and legislative candidates tend to overlap in most districts. It was only in 11 districts that legislative candidates came out ahead when their party’s presidential candidate fell behind.
Judging from the 2012 legislative elections, voters tend to vote for legislative candidates from the same party as their presidential candidate of choice, and the proportion of split votes was very low. The number of voters who split their votes between parties certainly did not reach the 40 percent claimed by the media. This means that, to turn the tide for legislative candidates by splitting the vote, the presidential candidate from that candidate’s party must not trail by more than 5 percent.
After Tsai Ing-wen proved immune to accusations of involvement in irregularities connected with the so-called “Yu Chang” (宇昌) case, all attempts to smear her reputation have failed, which has not been helpful to Chu’s election campaign.
However, Alex Tsai’s two attacks on Tsai Ing-wen regarding land speculation seem to be intended to arouse the willingness among pan-blue supporters to vote so that the difference between Chu and Tsai Ing-wen is not too significant and to give incumbent KMT legislators a chance to hold on to their seats.
In last year’s Taipei mayoral election, Alex Tsai was in charge of KMT candidate Sean Lien’s (連勝文) campaign. He picked fights and abused people on Facebook, gaining a lot of publicity, but Lien still lost by 250,000 votes and KMT councilors did not gain a majority in the city council. Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) and his campaign team later ridiculed Alex Tsai, praising him as the engineer behind Ko’s victory.
The public will have to wait until after Jan. 16 to find out if Tsai’s actions managed to stimulate KMT supporters to vote, or if they had the opposite effect and destroyed all hopes of voters splitting their vote.
Jan Shou-jung is a legislative assistant.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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