To be wrong is glorious: Chu's numbers in Hung Territory

Orchid Island sightseers

So the Taiwan ThinkTank poll gets passed around on Tuesday. It has the DPP's Tsai Ing-wen up 48-16 over KMT candidate Eric Chu with Soong at 10%. Wednesday I crash at my friend NewDad's place. In the midst of oohing and ahhing at his lovely new baby daughter, who fortunately for the rest of us resembles his very attractive wife, I remark that the poll is deep Green and probably deprecates Chu. "I'd give him another five points," I said.

Wrong!

The poll from the staidly establishment TISR came out a couple of days later. With nigh-on identical numbers (Solidarity): Tsai at 47, Chu at 16, Soong at 10. Tsai is crushing Chu around the nation, and by huge margins in New Taipei City. The Taiwan Thinktank poll observed that...

Voters appeared to strongly disapprove of Chu’s decision to run in the presidential election without first resigning from his post as New Taipei City mayor, as the poll showed that 63.5 percent of respondents said that Chu should quit as mayor, and 24.3 percent said he should not.

The CSPA poll earlier in the month (Solidarity) had 64% wanting Chu to resign as mayor.

Interestingly, Chu's stock has risen 7 points while Tsai's has fallen 9 points in the crucial central Taiwan battleground, but the poll doesn't give information as to why. Tsai continues to lead in all age groups and also in crucial middle voters.

I had a wonderful opportunity to talk politics on Thursday morning with a couple of attractive and intelligent young people. One of things I observed was that if the Deep Blues constitute 9% of the population -- judging from the support for eventual annexation to China in the polls -- and KMT voters comprise half the voters, then Deep Blues are probably around 20% of KMT votes. If half those voters stay home, then the KMT will lose 10% of its votes. This has happened before. In the 2004 legislative elections a huge chunk of the pan-Blue electorate, about 10%, stayed home. Here are the vote totals for the PFP and KMT in the legislative election:

2001 Blue vote: 5,136,827
2004 Blue vote: 4,552,831

Had Chen Shui-bian, then the DPP Chairman, not screwed up the elections, the DPP would have had an outright majority in the legislature and we might have been spared the vicious, vacuous incompetence of the last 7 years.

Hey, how about that 3Q economic growth? Worst since 2009, falling 1.01%. Another glorious victory for ECFA.

The Soong campaign? Is there one? He's been so quiet, not criticizing anyone. I wonder if he is hoping he can get the Veep slot in the Chu campaign.

Former candidate Hung Hsiu-chu was heavily scapegoated by the KMT, with articles in the international media reporting, without a trace of self-awareness, that Hung was thought to be too close to China. But the CSPA poll from earlier this month identified the problem: the public is sick of the KMT.

Who should take the responsibility for the KMT’s low election prospects, the KMT or Hung?
KMT: 75.8%
Hung: 5.8%

Chu's decline into Hung territory in the polls is more evidence of that.

This week the KMT took steps to retain the only remaining popular heavyweight, Speaker of the Legislature Wang Jin-pyng, by altering its rulz, which bear an eerie resemblance to actual rules, to permit him to stay on for another term. However, the alterations only affect the speaker of the legislature. They don't help Hung Hsiu-chu, who won't be on the party list for the deputy speaker slot since she has reached her term limit. When the KMT wants to betray you, it does a thorough job.

How different is Chu going to be than Ma? He's Ma 2.0: listen to him talk, defending his criticisms of Ma:

“For instance, the direction of the government’s cross-strait policy is, without doubt, on target, but its 12-year national education program has been a magnet for criticism,” Chu said.

Chu, who is also KMT chairman, acknowledged during a radio interview on Wednesday afternoon with Sisy Chen (陳文茜) that the perceived poor performance of the Ma administration was the biggest impediment to his election prospects.

He cited Ma’s controversial proposal to levy a capital gains tax, 12-year national education program and raising of electricity and fuel prices as examples of the mistakes that the KMT government had made in the past seven years.

I said a long time ago that the KMT's only possibly move was to run against Ma, but that isn't going to work with Chu firmly supporting one of the things that has peeved voters: Ma is too close to China. The 12 year education program is widely hated, as were the necessary raises in electricity and fuel prices. But they wouldn't have cost the KMT the election were it not for Ma's additional sellouts such as ECFA, the services pact, and the free enterprise zones.

Someone needs to ask whether Chu supports the free enterprise zones...
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Daily Links:

• Great piece over at Thinking Taiwan on the POW camps here in WWII.
• The brutality of the internet and fake news: a victim's tale.
• Sunflower queen summoned over international escort service

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