TAICHUNG (Taiwan News) — All things being normal, the Kuomintang (KMT) should be poised to do very well in this year’s 9-in-1 elections, which will see voters pick their winners in races from the borough chief level all the way up to county magistrates and mayors of the “big six” municipalities.

The KMT have an incumbent advantage in 14 of the 22 administrative leadership positions, several key Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) held areas are losing popular leaders to term limits, forcing them to start with new candidates, and in all past modern elections where the ruling party has been in power for six years, the opposition usually wins big.

The KMT also has a couple of strong “hens” (母雞, the Taiwanese term for a popular upstream candidate who can rally support for downstream candidates, aka “chicks”) to boost their “chicks” like city and county councillors. But the KMT should not be popping champagne corks just yet, this is anything but a normal election.

We examined this in our Part I of this series, as well as the first of many highly unusual factors that make this election unpredictable: The improbably high popularity of President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) of the DPP, in spite of her and her party having been in power for six years. It is unprecedented for a president to have been holding steady with an approval rating in the low-to-mid 50s this late in the game, and if it holds to election day on November 26, the impact it may have on the election results is unclear.

That is not the only unprecedented and unpredictable factor in this unusual election. In this Part II of the series, we are going to examine some of those other factors.

Factor 2: Crumbling support for the KMT and the rise of alternatives

If this were like most previous recent elections, the KMT would have another pillar of strength to rely on: A lot of blue-leaning voters simply dislike the DPP, and in the past, given the choice between voting for the DPP and KMT, they always opted for the KMT. I examined this phenomenon in a previous column, and further results coming in from the south have continued to confirm it, but depending on region roughly between the low 30s and the low 40s percentage of voters simply won’t vote for the DPP, period.

That is a potentially weak pillar to stand on because the reality is a surprisingly low number of those voters were voting for the KMT because they actually liked the party: It was simply the only alternative on offer. By contrast, in most regions, DPP voters said they did so because they liked the DPP, outnumbering those who voted for them because they disliked the KMT.

Since 1992, the National Chengchi University’s Election Study Center has been polling the "Latest Trend of Taiwanese Core Political Attitude," and the results from their latest poll in June are a stark warning for the KMT. It showed KMT support at an all time low of just 14%, while DPP came in with its third-best ever result at 31.1%.

Most other polls have similar results, with the DPP in the low 30s and the KMT in the mid-to-upper teens. With such weak support, voters who previously supported the KMT may shift their support to other options.

Fortunately for the KMT, however, the main options, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) and to a lesser extent, the New Power Party (NPP), simply do not have the resources to compete everywhere. Both parties also lack the infrastructure, experience, and politicians with name recognition that the KMT can offer.

That does not mean they will not be able to do any damage to the KMT, however. The NPP, which probably will draw votes off both the KMT and DPP, has a candidate running ahead of the KMT candidate in Miaoli in most polls, but still behind the DPP and an independent candidate.

More damaging to the KMT is the TPP, which has been courting more moderate, or “light blue” KMT voters. The TPP is running a total of 151 candidates in the elections at various levels.

In terms of top leadership positions, the TPP candidate in Hsinchu, Ann Kao (高虹安) and the independent but TPP-backed Vivian Huang (黃珊珊) in Taipei are the biggest threats. Though there are outlier polls, most polls show those candidates within the margin of error in support with their DPP and KMT opponents.

In both of those cases, the TPP candidates so far are not only showing that they are viable and could even potentially win, they are almost certainly taking a lot of support away from the KMT candidates. But even TPP candidates that so far are still polling fairly low, such as Lai Hsiang-lin (賴香伶) in Taoyuan, could potentially play the spoiler by syphoning off just enough votes to hand the election to someone other than the KMT candidate. Fortunately for the KMT, the TPP is not running candidates for the top posts in most cities and counties, but they could throw enough races to make KMT Chair Eric Chu’s (朱立倫) ambitious promise of winning 16 of the 22 cities and counties, and over half of the “big six” special municipalities that much harder to attain.

The KMT's efforts to appeal to mainstream voters

Chu is well aware of all of this, and is working hard to make the party more electable with mainstream voters, most notably by presenting the party as being pro-US and willing to stand up to China. He has also fairly successfully managed to engineer a slate of candidates that is more moderate, more likely to appeal to voters and less likely to make pro-China statements that will embarrass the party.

On the other hand, Chu has an uphill climb convincing voters that the party has moved toward the center of Taiwan politics after decades of being the pro-China party. Recent behavior, such as sending a delegation to China while Beijing carried out unprecedented military exercises and shot missiles over Taiwan, continue to create an image of a party out-of-touch with regular voter concerns.

So far, the KMT has not seen any boost in the polls on party identification, suggesting that Chu's message has not stuck with voters. However, we are now entering the period where voters really start to pay attention, and they may be more receptive as the race goes on.

But at this point, we just do not know if he will pull it off. It's one of the many factors we are just going to have to keep an eye on, and see how it plays out.

Tune in to my next column for more of the unprecedented, unpredictable and unusual factors weighing on this election. This is truly turning out to be a fascinating, nail-biting year.

This is Part II in this series, for Part I “Taiwan's unpredictable 9-in-1 elections: KMT hens and a curiously popular president” click here.