2024 ROC Prez and Legislative elections Jan 13th

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My impression from casually browsing this thread is that the DPP (pro-independence, historically Chinese colonizer dominated "center-left" party) has a persistent slight polling advantage in the Presidential race. This summary really makes me wonder what the partisan breakdown of a Taiwanese analogue of the Leipverse would be...

https://taiwanpolitics.quora.com/Who-do-the-LGBTs-of-Taiwan-support

Who do the LGBTs of Taiwan support?

Team Charcoal is back with another poll of Taiwan’s upcoming presidential election. This time, they decided to put a special spin to it: they decided to go to a gay pride parade and ask gay people and their supporters who they support. A little bit of background info: the DPP legalized gay marriage a few years ago. While there are a lot of DPP supporters who oppose gay marriage (particularly the Christians), leading to some people criticizing the DPP of only supporting gay marriage to follow the woke crowd, would gay people be appreciative of the DPP’s support of gay marriage?

If you understand Chinese and/or are interested in Taiwanese politics and gay rights, I highly recommend watching the whole video; I found it really informative. But if not, and you just want the results, here they are:

DPP’s Lai Ching-Te: 41 votes

TPP’s Ko Wen-Je: 9 votes

KMT’s Hou You-Yi: a whopping zero vote

Holy sh**t, the LGBT community is absolutely unforgiving towards the KMT. If you watch the video, a lot of the gay people say that they are grateful for the DPP for legalizing gay marriage. Even if there are DPP supporters who are not on board with gay marriage (such as the Christians), Taiwanese gay people are still, overall, really appreciative of what the DPP has done for gay rights. But perhaps even more interestingly, the gay people interviewed also said that they will not forget that the KMT actively worked against granting gay people their equal rights.

As a staunch KMT supporter, but also a staunch gay rights supporting, this was the most eye-opening and informative video that Charcoal has done so far. Honestly speaking, I don’t even blame gay people for not supporting the KMT. KMT is definitely on the wrong side of history with regards to their stances on gay rights.

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Education breakdown. TPP Ko is much stronger with higher educated voters.  This group voted for KMT Ma in 2008 and 2012 and TPP Tsai in 2016 and 2020.  This time neither KMT nor DPP will get that vote but TPP Ko will.


Gender and age.  This poll has TPP Ko stronger with men as expected and has the traditional KMT edge with women.  Age breakdown along expected lines with TPP Ko ultra strong with youth voters while KMT Hou stronger with older voters.

Has the KMT historically led with postgrads and women during the post-Cold War era? I understand why postgrads would have historically favored the KMT (with physicians and healthcare workers in general possibly being an exception). I also wonder why men would be more likely to vote third-party than women.

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Mirrormedia poll on open seat Taipei 5th (Blue +3) where a TPP-backed Pan-Blue independent is cutting into the KMT vote and maybe letting in the DPP candidate.

-snip-

By gender.  KMT candidate overperforms with women even though the two non-KMT candidates are women and he is not


By age.  This follows the trend of KMT being stronger with older voters and TPP-backed independents stronger with youth voters.


By education. Follows the national trend with  TPP-backed independents stronger with higher education voters

The educational divide is more linear in this legislative poll, and is closer to what we see in the US. In order of decreasing DPP margin: Postgrad > bachelors > trade school/vocational. High school grads are more DPP than postgrads though.

Has the KMT historically led with postgrads and women during the post-Cold War era? I understand why postgrads would have historically favored the KMT (with physicians and healthcare workers in general possibly being an exception). I also wonder why men would be more likely to vote third-party than women.

Since 2000 KMT always led with women.  I agree with you on postgrads which would lean toward DPP but in the 2000-2016 era, KMT was stronger with higher-educated voters (college grads) which did reverse post-2016.

Why exactly does Taiwan has a "reverse" (by Western standards) gender gap, where women favor the center-right party and men favor the center-left one?

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One topic in today's Prez debate besides the usual stuff (relationship with PRC, various zoning violations, various DPP corruption accusations) is lower income and class mobility.

It is totally true that over the last 20 years, income and class mobility have slowed down dramatically. It was pointed out that the chances of a kid from a high-income family getting into Taiwan University (the top University in ROC) is 8 times larger than a kid from a low-income family.  And this has nothing to do with legacies or "holistic" admissions that target URM (there are none in ROC anyway) or those that donate money to the University like the USA.  ROC university admissions are purely based on college entrance exams.  

The reason for this might be the rich being able to afford tutoring or cram school (my parents used to run/teach at college entrance cram schools back in the 1970s and made good money doing it).  But it is much more likely the result of assortative mating.   Before the rise of feminism trend on ROC during the 1990s, male doctors tend to marry female nurses.  Now with greater gender equity, male doctors marry women doctors.    This trend has created a clear and strong positive correlation between income and test scores when such a correlation used to be fairly weak back in the 1980s and before.

I understand that the ROC historically had some sort of "preference" for Overseas Chinese students, and that there was a controversy over Ma Ying-jeou's university admissions and whether he unfairly benefitted from 'affirmative action'.

An easy solution for the issue of "assortative mating" is, to use references to Netflix series characters, have lowlife fkboi delivery drivers like 小查 get with prim-and-proper schoolteacher-cum-romance novelists like 陳如蓉. It's certainly been suggested in the Anglophone West.

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KMT VP candidate Chao appearing on a Late Night a couple of days ago show was fairly effective in connecting him to the youth.  I do not think it will get KMT Hou that many votes but I think it did serve to lower the cynicism of the youth as a whole toward the KMT Hou-Chao ticket.

The late-night talk show included a satirical version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" where fun questions are asked of the guest.   In some cases they as cutting questions meant to make the guest look bad.  That took place with the first question they gave to Chao which was

"How hypocritical.  Who talks about affordable housing but owns a 103-room building with overpriced rent?" (this is a clear hit on KMT Hou whose wife inherited this building years ago from her parents)
a) TPP PR candidate Huang (former head of NPP)
b) KMT Hou
c) Famous pseudo-political commenter
d) KMT VP Chao

with the clear answer being b) but making Chao pick that answer is meant to make him and KMT Hou look bad
https://youtu.be/fHfXjUlLMRw?list=FLBZqnIPPjMvxL1cq6anDjYw&t=87

Chao came up with a scheme.  He wanted to ask to call someone to answer the question
https://youtu.be/fHfXjUlLMRw?list=FLBZqnIPPjMvxL1cq6anDjYw&t=108

and asked to call KMT Hou which got a wild reaction from the crowd
https://youtu.be/fHfXjUlLMRw?list=FLBZqnIPPjMvxL1cq6anDjYw&t=118

Then Chao got KMT Hou on the phone and after going back and forth with the host eventually picked b) and defused this difficult situation in a very entertaining way.
https://youtu.be/fHfXjUlLMRw?list=FLBZqnIPPjMvxL1cq6anDjYw&t=150

KMT VP candidate Chao is 73 but his years in entertainment and media served him well in this situation.

Interesting that the phone conversation between Hou and Chao is mostly in Hokkien, which tracks with your observations that the KMT is trying to win over more older, rural, and non-college voters relative to previous cycles.

The Late Night segment featuring TPP VP candidate Cynthia Wu is interesting. Within the first couple minutes, you can tell she's under 50 and was educated in the US based on how she name-drops politics/current events phrases in American-accented English and how she greets some Japanese acquaintances in the audience in basic, accented Japanese. Not hard to see why her ticket does particularly well among younger voters.

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Can someone explain Taiwanese political geography to me? I’ve always been curious but am having trouble piecing it together.

It's roughly ethno-linguistic, at least at a basal level, though it should be noted that the entire subject is a very messy one in Taiwan:

Historically the KMT [Chinese nationalists] coalition has been post-WW2 refugees from Communism who represent the institutional dominance of Mandarin (even though they mostly came from non-Mandarin speaking parts of China), Hakka speakers, and Taiwanese aborigines. The DPP [Chinese colonizer] coalition was historically the descendants of Hokkien-speaking settlers from southern Fujian province, who comprise a supermajority of the Taiwanese population. Progressive language shift towards Taiwanese Mandarin among younger generations, political + economic centralization around Taipei, and educational + urban-rural polarization complicate the picture somewhat. But Hokkien-speaking identity is stronger in southern Taiwan, and that’s definitely connected with the DPP base being strongest around Tainan and Kaohsiung. 

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KMT Hou speaks in Hoklo a lot more than DPP Lai and TPP Ko.  If you go by what dialect each candidate is using you would think that Hou is the DPP candidate, certainly by 1990s and 2000s standards.

KMT Hou is trying to target light-green older voters which was the whole purpose of nominating KMT Hou in the first place until the race became a 3-way race earlier this year.

In a truly ironic twist, various pro-DPP youth internet circles continue to complain that they do not know Hoklo well and could not understand what KMT Hou was saying in the debate.  This is ironic because the DPP of the 1990s was all about the normalization of the Hoklo dialect with a de facto Hoklo identity.

The fact that urban pro-DPP youth could not understand Hoklo speaks a lot about the churn I talked about in terms of alignment by education with a relative shift of the DPP base toward those with higher education since 2016.   People with higher education tend to be Mandarin only while people with lower education tend to be Hoklo/Mandarin.   DPP Perz Tsai also normalized Mandarin within the DPP.  DPP Prez Tsai is famously bad at speaking Hoklo and her Hoklo speeches at rallies are so cringe that she usually switches back to Mandarin after a few minutes.

During the debate, DPP Lai spoke completely in Mandarin which represents his campaign trying to battle TPP Ko over the urban higher-educated youth.

I wonder if the KMT ticket’s pandering to more Hokkien-dominant voters was in any way related to Hou Yu-ih’s perceived underperformance. Haven’t been following your analysis of downballot races closely enough to really be able to tell if this was mostly a third-party spoiler effect. It’s possible that was the KMT ticket’s attempt to compensate for a probable spoiler effect, and that TPP would’ve done even better if Hou/Jaw didn’t play into Hokkien language identitarianism?

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While we await jaichind's presumptive return on the Tiananmen anniversary...

https://taiwanpolitics.quora.com/Team-Charcoal-asks-young-people-about-Tsai-Ing-Wen

Last time, Team Charcoal mainly asked older middle aged Taiwanese on their views of Tsai. The result was that old people held overly positive views of Tsai’s presidency.

This time, Charcoal is mainly interviewing the younger generations. Here are the results for those that don’t want to watch the video:

Very satisfied: 3
Satisfied: 9
No opinion: 10
Dissatisfied: 11
Very dissatisfied: 17

In the sharpest twist of irony, Tsai (and very likely, along with the rest of the DPP) is extremely UNpopular among young people, who are generally considered to be the DPP’s most diehard supporters.

Nonetheless, poll results could be deceiving. While KMT has been hoping that these youth voters will switch to the KMT, the truth is that’s not going to happen. If you actually watch the video and listen to what people have to say, a lot of young people actually said that Tsai is not green enough, and that they were hoping Tsai could have achieved real Taiwanese independence.

Reminiscent of post-1990 voters (in the US) disapproving of Biden but also still being fairly reliably D as a birth cohort.

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https://twitter.com/MyLordBebo/status/1791558207996895335

The reason why Taiwan's legislators are fighting is because the Legislative Yuan wants to expand its power, which infringes on the interests of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

Currently, the Taiwan government is controlled by the DPP, while the courts are independent, but the Legislative Yuan is controlled by the Kuomintang (KMT) and the People's Party. Because in the past eight years, the DPP also controlled the Legislative Yuan, leading to the Legislative Yuan completely following the government's orders, losing its supervisory function. The KMT and the People's Party drafted an expansion of powers bill, allowing the Legislative Yuan to check and balance the government, but it infringed on the DPP's interests. However, the rules of the Legislative Yuan are that the side with more votes wins, and the side with fewer votes loses. The DPP cannot use legitimate channels to stop the vote, so they want to use violence to solve the problem. Therefore, the fighting began.

What are the contents of the Legislative Yuan Reform Bill 5?

1. Normalizing the President's National Intelligence Report: The President should submit the National Intelligence Report to the Legislative Yuan before February 1 each year and make a report before March 1. The new President should submit the National Intelligence Report within two weeks of taking office and make a report within one month. That is to say, if the bill passes before May 20, the new President, Lai Qingde, will have to go to the Legislative Yuan for a National Intelligence Report before June 20.

2. The Legislative Yuan's investigative powers and the right to hold hearings: The Legislative Yuan adds two new chapters, "Exercise of Investigative Powers" and "Exercise of Hearing Powers," which clearly define the rights of legislators to investigate and summon related persons. Can exercise investigative powers and the right to review for bills or matters of major relevance.

3. Contempt of Congress: Legislators, in exercising their investigative powers, may require government agencies, units, corporate bodies, and groups to provide relevant documents, books, and other materials within five days, and may question related personnel as necessary or order them to testify. Serious government officials may be referred for impeachment or disciplinary action, and those who make false statements may be sentenced to up to one year in prison, detention, or a fine of less than NT$200,000.

4. Strengthening the Legislative Yuan's consent power: When the Legislative Yuan exercises its consent power, it does not go through discussion and is submitted to the plenary session of the committee for review. After the review, it is proposed to the plenary session for a roll-call vote, and if more than half of the total number of legislators agree, it is passed.

5. The Speaker and Deputy Speaker of the Legislative Yuan are elected by a roll-call vote of legislators.