With less than one month left before the special municipality elections, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers announced that the entire caucus would be traveling around the country this month to shore up votes for DPP candidates.
“The legislative caucus has joined the election trail,” DPP whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) said in the legislature yesterday. “And our final goal is to win in all five cities.”
As the tightly fought campaign draws to its home stretch, DPP lawmakers are sparing no efforts in the elections, where a win could give themselves a boost in the legislative polls next year.
“We already decided in a meeting that with such critical elections coming up, the caucus cannot afford to be absent,” Ker said.
Ker, along with other DPP legislators, was wearing a white campaign T-shirt for the party’s Sinbei City mayoral candidate, DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文).
Party lawmakers are expected to start canvassing the streets today, saying that they would likely visit night markets and other public gatherings to stump for DPP mayoral candidates and city councilors.
“We will split into separate areas,” DPP Legislator Pan Meng-an (潘孟安) said. “And as long as there are requests from candidates during the next month, we will do our best to fulfill them.”
The announcement could represent one of the DPP’s final pushes before the Nov. 27 elections, where some polls show opposition candidates running neck-and-neck with their Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) rivals in Taipei City and Sinbei City, the name Taipei County will be known by after it is upgraded to a special municipality next month.
The two races are “very, very close,” said Cheng Wen-tsang (鄭文燦), a spokesperson for Tsai’s campaign.
He said he believed that the addition of DPP lawmakers into the race would leave an impression on the public.
“The elections are at a critical stage,” he said. “We estimate that we will need an additional 3 percent to win in Taipei City and Sinbei City.”
One of the DPP’s other final efforts took place in the recording studio yesterday, when all five mayoral candidates took part in the filming of an election ad that will be broadcast nationwide in the middle of this month.
The rare gathering of DPP candidates symbolized that the opposition party was all in this together, Tsai said, speaking before the three-hour filming session in a studio in Taipei City.
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