With Tsai's ratings low with no clear way out and while the KMT has mostly closed the gap with the DPP but very little people are crediting KMT chairman Wu for it, the winner out of all this is former KMT Prez Ma a year and a half after leaving who was enemy number one for the Pan-Green bloc and abandoned by Deep Blue and Light Blue alike. Now Ma's popularity is surging. One way one can tell are the popularity of Ma Chinese New Year Decorations which are put up on the doors of households and are usually written words of good fortune.
Historically the New Year Decorations written by the current ROC President are the most popular (kinds of like Gallup's poll of most admired Man is usually headed the sitting President.) Last year Prez Ma's office gave out around 50K of such decorations. This year given the massive demand for Ma Chinese New Year Decorations 250K has already been printed and sold out and another batch is several hundred thousand are now being frantically being printed. The Tsai Chinese New Year Decorations has printed 250K or so and that seems to be meeting demand.
One inevitably wonders if the ROC constitution allows for non-consecutive re-election. Or perhaps Eric Chu will give it another go. Interestingly he was a doctoral student of a colleague of my father's.
The problem is clear for the DPP. Its core vote base Southern Taiwan are made up of Bubbas and Billy Bobs yet its activist based in the North are made up of Progressive activist youth and the DPP MPs somewhere in the middle.
One also wonders how this would be translated into Mandarin!
