The consensus on the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chair race is that Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) ran a populist, ideological back-to-basics campaign and soundly defeated former Taipei mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌), the candidate backed by the big institutional players. Cheng tapped into a wave of popular enthusiasm within the KMT, while the institutional players’ get-out-the-vote abilities fell flat, suggesting their power has weakened significantly.
Yet, a closer look at the race paints a more complicated picture, raising questions about some analysts’ conclusions, including my own.
TURNOUT
Here is a surprising statistic: Turnout was 130,678, or 39.46 percent of the 331,145 eligible party members.
To put this in perspective, never has a full-term KMT chair race ever had a turnout lower than 50 percent. It even compares poorly to by-elections, coming in second-to-last.
Cheng won 65,122 votes, or 50.15 percent of the total. That is only slightly higher than Chang Ya-chung’s (張亞中) 60,631 for a 32.59 percent second-place finish in 2021.
Party insiders quoted in KMT-friendly media outlets like United Daily News were expecting a far higher turnout. It was a reasonable assumption based on past turnout and boosted by the most favorable political climate for the party in a long time.
This suggests that neither excitement for Cheng’s populist campaign nor institutional forces were very effective in getting out the vote.
However, there is a sadder, more human possibility for the low turnout. In the campaign, it was brought up that two-thirds of KMT party members are aged 65 or older. KMT membership has been shrinking for years, and has lost roughly 10 percent since 2021.
Was this a failure to get party members excited to vote, or were many simply too elderly to do so — or a bit of both?
THE MA ERA IS OVER
The question of whether the KMT will move more toward the political center and drop the unpopular “1992 consensus” once former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and his generation leave the stage has been answered.
It is clearly “no.” Cheng ran on an ideology strikingly similar to Ma’s, but with zero help from him.
After stepping down as president, Ma still held considerable power in the party, but there have been signs of Ma’s waning influence in the last few years. For example, during the recall rallies, he was brought up to speak near the beginning with the mid-tier players, and was not one of the power rally closers.
There was a time when Ma, as the powerful party elder, would not have publicly declared for a candidate to keep above the fray, but could have quietly pulled strings to influence the result.
This time Ma was reduced to making a direct appeal to support Lo Chih-chiang (羅智強) in a video posted to social media. Only 10.4 percent voted for Lo, and how much of that was attributable to Ma rather than Lo’s own personal appeal is debatable, but likely his influence was low.
INSTITUTIONAL DISUNITY
Most of the existing power figures and institutional leaders backed Hau, yet he only managed 35.85 percent with 46,551 votes. The picture grows murkier when examining “most” and “existing.”
Among KMT elected leaders, Hau was the preferred pick, with two major exceptions. One was the confusing behavior of Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安). At one point, some press reports had him backing Hau, but then backed off.
The most critical leader is Taichung mayor and frontrunner to be the KMT presidential nominee in 2028, Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕). Prudently realizing she would have to work with whoever won, she pointedly met with candidates but endorsed none.
However, her words, actions and tone were clearly more favorable to both Hau and Cheng. According to Hau, she not only met with him but also sent him encouraging text messages to “step on the gas” (加油), but she also said to Cheng: “We are sisters, sisters take care of sisters.”
Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康), the media mogul, talk show personality and KMT vice presidential candidate last year, had at one point appeared to be in the race, but stepped aside for his longtime comrade-in-arms Hau, saying “a vote for Hau is a vote for Jaw.”
Undoubtedly, Jaw’s support helped Hau, but how much is hard to say, and whatever it was, it was not enough to push Hau over the top.
Another key figure who met with candidates, but did not publicly endorse anyone, was Wang Jin-pyng (王金平), the former legislative speaker and elder statesman of the local KMT patronage factions. He was more actively courted than his archnemesis Ma, which he must have enjoyed.
The biggest local patronage faction leaders lined up behind Hau, especially the mighty Yunlin Chang clan. In spite of famously having united the factions in the runup to the 2018 local elections to deliver a landslide victory for the KMT, this time Wang stayed above the fray, likely because he no longer had much to gain, and because the factions were not entirely united.
Some lower-level factional pols openly supported Cheng, and there were anecdotal quotes in the media suggesting they were far from united behind Hau. There were even rumors that Wang’s Kaohsiung White Faction supported Cheng.
With the KMT now lacking the finances and muscle to keep the local factions in line, some — most notably the Yunlin Chang clan — have broken out of the local geographical straightjackets that the party had previously imposed on them.
Cheng only lost two counties, one of them her home county of Yunlin — proving the Yunlin Chang clan still dominates there. The other was Pingtung, and with their power largely based on control of agricultural networks, it is possible the Yunlin Changs helped there, backed by local factions.
Though much attention was focused on the local factions and their institutional power, in reality, they have almost never been united and have often been in conflict.
A major institutional factor that technically no longer exists is the recently disbanded Huang Fuhsing (黃復興) military veteran’s group. Once famous for being a united power bloc, Cheng proved popular with many of them — though they realistically haven’t been unified for over a decade.
WEAK WIN
On the surface, it appears that Cheng beat the institutional powers, though on closer scrutiny that does not entirely hold up.
None of the institutions were entirely united, and all had key defections. Lu Shiow-yen’s lack of endorsement and nod-and-a-wink acceptance of either Cheng or Hau left a hole wide enough to drive a bus through.
That Cheng inspired excitement and won over a party eager to win with the wind finally at their back after years in the wilderness is also debatable. The low turnout does raise the possibility that there was less excitement than many suggest.
While she won decisively in this low turnout race, she only won a majority of 0.15 percent of the vote, so almost half of the voters preferred someone else. Most previous chair races were won by landslides.
Additionally, the wind at the KMT’s back is already showing signs of flagging. In the latest Formosa poll taken after the election, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won back their lead as the party looked at most favorably, after a few months of the KMT having pulled ahead.
Cheng deserves credit for her victory, but the much-vaunted institutional support for Hau was fragmented, and having already lost two previous chair races, Hau was a weak and uninspiring candidate.
Donovan’s Deep Dives is a regular column by Courtney Donovan Smith (石東文) who writes in-depth analysis on everything about Taiwan’s political scene and geopolitics. Donovan is also the central Taiwan correspondent at ICRT FM100 Radio News, co-publisher of Compass Magazine, co-founder Taiwan Report (report.tw) and former chair of the Taichung American Chamber of Commerce. Follow him on X: @donovan_smith.
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