Why the DPP lost the election

As everyone knows, the DPP lost the local elections on Saturday. This was expected by all serious observers. What does this loss mean, and how bad was it?





What was the score?



It's important to tote up what actually happened: The Taipei Times had the call:

The KMT won 14 out of 23 city and county constituencies, while the DPP -- which previously controlled 10 counties and cities -- won just six seats.

Among the constituencies that changed hands from the DPP to the KMT were the traditional pan-green strongholds of Taipei and Ilan Counties. The DPP also lost Chiayi City, long an anti-KMT sanctuary during the days of Martial Law and the dangwai democracy movement.

At the local level, the situation was:

City and county council election results indicate that the pan-blue camp -- the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the People First Party (PFP) -- won a majority of seats, obtaining around 47 percent of a total 901 seats.

The pan-green camp -- the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) -- followed closely behind with 24 percent of the seats.

Final figures were unavailable as of press time, but independent candidates took as many as 256 seats.

This looks like a savaging and everyone is spinning it that way. Certainly at the county level the DPP took at beating, losing the counties of Taipei, Chiayi, and I-lan. It was inevitable that the DPP would lose Taipei County sooner or later, since the north is heavily mainlander, and full of civil servants who support the KMT as well. The loss of I-lan, however, was a serious coup for the KMT, since not only has that long been a DPP stronghold, but the KMT candidate was someone who would not have looked out of place in Goodfellas. The DPP also lost Chiayi county, another DPP fief.

But there are a couple of things that should be recalled. First, the DPP did take Yunlin county, long a stronghold of KMT machine politics. Moreover, in this campaign the DPP candidate was a female who offered articulate clear policy choices, and the KMT "local faction" machine that would not have looked out of place in Goodfellas was in disarray due to the arrests of its leadership. Yunlin points to a clear two-pronged DPP strategy -- take out the local gangs that support the KMT, and offer the public something positive, and the votes will roll in. In I-lan, only half of this strategy was followed, resulting in defeat.

Here's another interesting thing about this "defeat." Let's take a look at those figures for local council seats:

The pan-green camp -- the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) -- followed closely behind with 24 percent of the seats.

Wow! Just 24%. Looks grim, until you look at the previous scores:

1998: Blues: 52% Greens: 16%
2001: Blues: 49% Greens: 17%
2005: Blues: 47% Greens: 24%

Folks, I might be slightly math-challenged, but there's a clear trend here, and these results show a resounding 41% gain in four years. No way to spin this other than as a DPP success.

The same trend, albeit not as marked, also showed in the election for township chiefs.

Township election results were also returning a pan-blue majority. At press time, the percentage of pan-blue chiefs elected in the 319 townships stood at 55 percent, while the pan-green camp had around 11 percent.

In the last township chief elections in 2001, pan-blue chiefs secured 62 percent nationwide, while the pan-greens took only 9 percent.

Sure, it doesn't look like much...but the Greens grew about 20%. The good guys may have been slaughtered at the County Chief level, but we're inching up at the local level. The DPP needs to more aggressively pursue the gangster-businessmen combines that run the townships and towns across Taiwan, and make sure to get candidates for every seat. The results will not only be a cleaner Taiwan, but more DPP candidates elected at the local level. Of course, with the KMT in charge of so many counties now, pursuing "Black Gold" may become more difficult.



The Uphill Climb: Why the Loss?





Most of the reasons for the DPP's loss are well known and need no enumeration here. The effective KMT campaign to hamstring governance, the pro-KMT broadcast media, the string of scandals, including the Kaohsiung MRT scandal, the TVBS disaster, and the crowning revelation by a pro-DPP doctor of Taichung Mayor Hu Tz-chiang's health records, along with the confused reaction to those scandals, the ascension of Ma Ying-jeou to KMT Chairman, and various other factors. I'd like to comment on a couple of things........


China
What China?

That's right. What China?

If the import of this hasn't hit you, it should be smacking you on the head like a club by now. It is easy to identify factors such as the DPP's poor overall localization strategies, the KMT's long establishment at the local level, or the greater financial advantages of the former ruling party, but it is much harder to see what is missing. And here's something that wasn't there: China.

Not a peep was heard out of China this election. Someone has finally convinced the thick-headed bureaucrats in Beijing that if they grit their teeth and hold their tongue, the KMT will deliver Taiwan to them. For the first time Beijing did not provide the DPP with fodder it could use to rally the troops and sway the undecided. Many commentators abused the DPP for following its tried and true strategy of pointing out that a KMT victory meant Beijing was that much closer to swallowing Taiwan. The DPP looked slightly absurd for claiming that in rallies late in the election, and the chattering class grew shrill in its declaration that the strategy was outmoded. What they failed to note was why that strategy failed. It did not fail because it was fundamentally incorrect in its assessment of the relationship between Beijing and the KMT, or because voters would not respond to it. It failed because for the first time Beijing gave the DPP nothing it could point to as fresh evidence of China's nefarious intentions. As a factor in this election Beijing ceased to exist.

Brilliant. If China can resist the temptation to threats and bluster -- and so far Beijing has shown the diplomatic finesse of a Kaiser Wilhelm -- then it will enormously smooth the KMT's task of delivering the island into its hands.

Localization
The DPP's localization problems were neatly illustrated by the experience of our home township. As I noted earlier, volunteers for the campaign of the county chief, Chiu Tai-san, had told us that Chiu banners they had placed in our township tended to disappear. As if that were not lesson enough, on election day I dropped my wife off at the local school to vote. As she stepped out of the car, she was accosted by Taiwanese local faction members, who would not have looked out of place in Goodfellas. Members of the "red-lipped tribe", the local circumlocution for betel nut chewers, they told her in a wheezy, betel-nut colored undertone to vote for number 8, the KMT candidate. As she went in, she encountered a local policemen bringing out tea to the local faction members who would not have looked out of place in Goodfellas. No wonder the DPP has problems.

In addition to the problems of the DPP everyone has noted, we should also point out that in the election for township chief, both the candidates were KMT. There was no DPP candidate for our township -- this despite the fact that our township went for Chen in 2004 and should have been a good ground for further gains. This represents another pervasive problem for the DPP: not enough quality people at all levels to stand in local elections.

Look up "All politics is local" in your quotations dictionary and there you will find a picture of Taiwan. In contrast to the DPP, which keeps pulling keep people out of local areas and into the central government, the KMT has taken that dictum to heart. The China Post notes:

The DPP could take some comfort in the fact that five KMT winners in the elections are members of the national Legislature.

They will have to give up their lawmaker seats, and as a result the opposition camp will lose their thin majority in the Legislature.

While the DPP in their heyday never once obtained a majority of seats in the Legislature, the next two years until the 2007 legislative elections may be the only time that the DPP comes closest to dominating the Legislature. (thanks for the tip, STOP_george)

In other words, the KMT put so much emphasis on the local elections that they were willing to rotate people out of the legislature and risk losing their majority, in order to make gains at the local level. The DPP's local successes, limited though they may be, have significantly impaired the KMT's machine politics, both by redirecting money flows away from KMT cronies, and by getting KMT allies in trouble with the law. The willingness of the KMT to bring people out of the legislature may reflect confidence in its ability to get those seats back, and keep the DPP at bay there. Or it may reflect a quiet desperation: the KMT is pre-eminently the party of local factions, and outsiders have not yet grasped just what a rickety coalition it really is. At the moment it is attracting even less young talent than the DPP. As Taiwan's civic society becomes more entrenched, and the population ever more educated, the KMT's long-term prospects are not bright. Is the KMT's local election strategy the first move in a Counter-Reformation, or just the dying gasp of a party bereft of vision and hope? Only time will tell.

The KMT's historical advantages continued. Last week the Lost Spaceman bemoaned the incredible loyalty of local aborigines on the East Coast to the KMT despite the fact that DPP policy toward them is much better. Not only did Hualien continue as a KMT fief, but I-lan went to the Dark Side as well. Hakkas, long a KMT constituency, also continued their support of the former ruling party. It is mind-bloggling to imagine that the Hakkas in Taiwan feel that a Hoklo (Taiwanese) government in Taipei would be indifferent to their interests, while a Han government in Beijing would listen to them. The DPP needs to work still harder on getting local minorities to come over.




What Will The Future Bring?





The KMT attack machine positioned this election as a chance to give the DPP a lesson. On talk shows and in the print media, KMT commentators drove this point home. However, it should be noted that in the next election, voters may feel they have driven their point home and revert to previous pro-DPP trends. This is because Taiwanese dislike all-or-nothing solutions where human beings are involved, feeling that those lack ren ching. They may just instinctively restore the balance next time around.

How much momentum does this give the KMT going into the next round of elections? Not much, I'd say. The KMT is a local party, and national elections -- the legislative and presidential elections coming up -- are where the DPP performs well. Looking past the county chief failure, the DPP actually made gains in the townships and in the town councils. That augurs well for the next election round. Remember that for all those nice pictures of a Blue northern Taiwan you've seen since the election, the local factions are not uniformly Blue, and there are plenty of "Blue" townships -- such as the one we live in -- where the chief is Blue, but the voters went for Chen in the 2008 elections. The real Taiwan is a patchwork quilt.

More interesting will be the potential political re-alignments. There's always talk of the PFP and KMT getting back together -- if only James Soong weren't hated nearly as much as Chen Shui-bian by the mainlanders in the KMT -- and it may increase. Or perhaps, as a perceptive commenter on David at jujuflop's blog noted, they may be emboldened to pursue an alliance with the DPP, feeling marginalized by the apparently growing might of the KMT. It should be noted that Wang Jyng-ping, Ma's ethnic Taiwanese rival for the KMT chairmanship, was basically left out of the election run up. Look for something interesting from there over the next couple of years. I feel that the urbane, hardworking, and well-liked Wang has not yet played his last card.

The big loser here was not the DPP but the TSU, which did not gain a single county chiefdom. It is time the DPP made a serious push to bring the TSU back into the fold and eliminate a rival on its left. Voters treat the TSU like a teenage boy to whom girls always say "You're such a good friend...." It is instructive to recall that in the infamous Chu An-hsiung scandal in which he spent $10 million in bribes to fix the Kaohsiung city council election, Chu didn't even bother to bribe the lone TSU member of the council. It's silly to have two Taiwan nationalist parties. One should go.

Will we see a more open DPP policy toward China? The local punditocracy is calling for it, but this deponent feels that we won't. Taiwanese businessmen are already diversifying out of China and local investment there is dropping. If the Chinese economy slows over the next couple of years, as many are saying, so will pressure on Chen to promote links with China.

Additional talk-talk:

David at jujuflop (and don't miss the comment from James)
Jason at Wandering to Tamshui
Sun Bin too wonders who really won

[Taiwan] [DPP] [KMT]