They might ignore the national appeals and continue to vote on local issues. That would be better understood as a rejection of the proposed frame, not a no-confidence vote in Tsai and her policies.
[Ex: In the USA, if Republicans want to talk about crime and Democrats want to talk about health care, a Republican win probably means that voters focused more on crime rather than that they are now winning on health care.]
I acknowledge that this seems like a tortured conclusion: if voters don’t support Tsai after she asked them to vote for her, it doesn’t actually mean they don’t support her. Nevertheless, I don’t think the referendum angle would be the right one.
I think there were two dominant trends this year. First, the DPP failed to get enough votes. Second, incumbents did very well. These two trends seemed fairly independent of each other.
This was not a good year to ask for a third term on unfriendly turf. It’s always difficult for a term-limited politician to transfer power to a designated successor, even when that term-limited politician is quite popular. Just as Nixon, Humphrey, Gore, and Hillary Clinton about that.
This year several candidates centered their campaigns around asking for a third term. All of those running in challenging partisan environments (Huang in Taipei and the DPP in Taoyuan, Keelung, and Hsinchu City) lost handily. If you were not actually the incumbent, you didn’t get the incumbent bump.
Why did the DPP do so badly? Every pundit seems to have an explanation. It was too much negative campaigning, poor pandemic policies, Tsai monopolized nomination decisions and botched them, the referendum was a lousy flagship policy for progressive politics, they didn’t run against China strongly enough, the dull economy, Chinese pressure,
No one has any hard evidence for their pet theory since we don’t have any exit polling data. That doesn’t stop them from being absolutely sure about the root problem.
Turnout is a complex phenomenon, and it seems implausible to me that the decision to vote or stay home was divided neatly along party lines. It’s more likely that this was a low turnout election in which voters of all persuasions decided to sit it out.
Sure, there may have been more DPP sympathizers who stayed home, but it is far more likely that the next million people to vote would have been split 55-45 than 95-5. We should probably spend more time thinking about the people who did vote than the people who didn’t.
Sunflower shook up the system and caused many voters to rethink their previous voting habits. However, their new voting habits were perhaps not quite as solidly fixed as I previously believed. Many of the voters who seemed to switch from blue to green perhaps only did so conditionally.
My initial thought is something to the effect of: when sovereignty is on the ballot and the status quo seems threatened, they will vote for the DPP. When it is not, perhaps their old distaste for the DPP is still there, and they are quite willing to vote for the KMT.
National identity usually drives voting, but not always. The challenge for the KMT is to figure out how to remove China from national elections, or at least to become the status quo party again.
Let’s shift gears and talk about Taipei. Wayne won by 12%, getting 43% of the vote. I’m not that impressed. 43% for a KMT candidate in Taipei is hardly remarkable.
Ma got 51% and 64% in his two races, and Hau got 54% and 56% in his two. In the last two elections, Lien and Ting both got 41%, and they were widely considered to have been failures. 43%? Meh.
Is it unfair to expect the KMT to get as many votes in 2022 as they managed ten or twenty years ago? A week ago I might have thought so, but the blue side just produced results in Taoyuan, Keelung, Hsinchu, and Taichung that would have been very familiar in 2001 and 2002. Chen Shih-chung’s 31% wasn’t the problem here.
（看來他原先認為黃珊珊由於代表第三政黨因此贏面較大？！）