For an overview of the race, "An extremely tight, tense Taipei mayoral race" click here. For a look at Chiang Wan-an, "Can Chiang Wan-an win back Taipei for KMT?" click here. For an examination of the Chen campaign, “After 24 years, could Chen Shih-chung win back Taipei for the DPP?” click here.
TAICHUNG (Taiwan News) — The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) desperately wants to win the capital, something it has only managed once — in 1994. The Kuomintang (KMT), frustrated at being locked out of power by Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) for eight years, is salivating at the thought of winning back a city they traditionally have dominated.
Both parties have a real shot at winning, but most non-partisan polls show their candidates are locked in a tight three-way race with quasi-independent Vivian Huang (黃珊珊). The latest My-Formosa poll (whose numbers I will be using throughout this article) has Huang, the DPP’s Chen Shih-chung (陳時中) and the KMT’s Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) within a narrow 1.8% band, well within the 3% margin of error.
Starting in 1998, Huang served on the Taipei city council until 2019, when she joined the Ko administration as a vice mayor. She resigned to run for mayor to replace Ko, who is being term-limited out.
Independent with party affiliations
Technically, she is running as an independent, but she is actually a member of the previously successful but now small pan-blue People First Party (PFP). Curiously, however, she appears to have a terrible relationship with her party.
The number of supporters from other parties saying they do not intend to vote is in the low single digits, but a staggering 48.2% of PFP supporters plan to sit this one out. Only 38.1% of her party members plan to vote for her.
Her party’s founder and chairman-for-life, James Soong (宋楚瑜) refused to show at the launch of her campaign. He has also so far refused to endorse her for mayor.
Huang is far closer to the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) and their chair, Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je. So much so that nearly everyone, including myself, mistakenly assumed she would be running as their candidate.
Ko has endorsed her, and showed up at her campaign launch. Huang attends TTP party events, joins their rallies, and TPP candidates run ads showing her image alongside the candidate.
A total of 68.8% of TPP voters plan to vote for her. Huang talks and acts very much like she is in the TPP.
She’s also popular with the New Power Party (NPP), recently showing up at an NPP city council candidate’s rally. Though the current NPP chair noted Huang does not represent the party, former NPP Chair Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) recently stated that “if I lived in Taipei, I would definitely vote for Vivian Huang,” while 53% of NPP voters support her.
Pan-blue candidate Huang
Though she presents herself as being beyond the blue/green party divide, the reality is she is pan-blue, albeit a light blue. She started her political career in the New Party, which was pretty deep blue then, though it had not gone totally off the pro-China deep end yet.
Her current party, the PFP, is also unabashedly pan-blue. To her credit, however, when party Chair Soong said he approved of Chairman Xi Jinping’s (習近平) call to “discuss one country two systems” in 2019, Huang resigned as the head of the party’s information department in protest, though she remained in the party.
Like Ko, Huang wants to keep dialogue and relations with China alive. On a talk show she pointed out that she was a second-generation 49er (those who fled the Chinese Civil War) and as a PFP member she “of course I want cross-strait peace” and “at the same time must keep economic prosperity,” both of which are pan-blue talking points.
She also noted that if elected mayor she would maintain the Taipei-Shanghai Twin Cities forum. When asked about the slogan “resist China, protect Taiwan” she called for Taiwanese to unite to protect Taiwan, but disagreed with the first part, saying it “created antagonism.”
Youth are backing her
In spite of being pan-blue, even one-third of the fiercely pro-independence Taiwan Statebuilding Party (TSP) supporters back her, as do many normally pan-green-leaning younger voters. She leads slightly in the 20-29 demographic, but in the 30-39 grouping she has 47.1% support — more than both of her two main competitors combined.
In the 40-49 demo, she is slightly behind the DPP’s Chen Shih-chung, but is once again at the top with voters aged 50-59. However, with older voters, her support falls off a cliff, with just half the support of the KMT’s Chiang Wan-an with those over 60 and just one-third his support with those over 70.
Like the other two candidates she’s running neck-and-neck with, Huang has some strengths and weaknesses.
Appealing beyond partisan politics
So far, her message of being above partisan politics has been well-received with younger voters, independents and supporters of smaller parties, though older voters do not seem to be buying it. Surprisingly, she is pulling in roughly the same amount of support from KMT and DPP supporters, 11.4% and 11.6% respectively, and some other polls have shown she is getting more support from the DPP side.
She also manages to utilize the skills she has honed over more than two decades in politics without coming across as fake or insincere as many politicians do. She comes across as knowledgeable and possessing a can-do spirit.
This has made her the most liked candidate in the race, her favorability coming in at 48.8%, topping Chiang’s 46.6% and Chen’s 33.5%. She is also the least disliked according to the latest poll by pan-blue outlet TVBS.
That poll asked the question “who would you absolutely not vote for?” Chen Shih-chung came in tops at a whopping 42.7%, Chiang Wan-an second at 15.9%, but only a minuscule 4.1% totally rejected Huang.
Huang also comes out on top in terms of experience. With over 20 years experience in the Taipei City council and now several years as vice mayor, her qualifications for becoming mayor are solid.
Cleverly piggybacking off parties
On the downside, she is not backed by a party. While we do not know her campaign finances, it is likely that the two big party candidates have bigger budgets that allow for more exposure.
It’s not just budgets where being backed by a party is helpful, it is also personnel. The parties have teams of experienced operatives and sophisticated get-out-the-vote operations.
That being said, Huang seems to be cleverly working around these drawbacks. For exposure, she has skillfully kept herself in the media, easily keeping pace with her two main opponents in the press, where the other nine small party and independent candidates in the race barely register.
While she is still missing some of the personnel that a big party offers, she is to a certain degree piggybacking off the TPP and to a lesser degree, the NPP. Showing up at their candidate’s rallies is a clever move, saving her team organizational headaches and money, while getting all the exposure such rallies offer for free.
She has also managed to get some support from a fair number of local neighborhood borough chiefs (里長), some of which are bucking their own parties. They can play a helpful role in getting out the vote.
Good position to win undecideds
So far, as long as these three campaigns remain roughly in balance and none of candidates starts falling behind in the polls, there will not be “dump-save” strategic voting, as explained in the first column in this series. That leaves the candidates to fight over the 10.5% that remain undecided.
Chen has so far failed to get younger voters to realize that Huang has some ideology that most of them disapprove of. This may be a problem with a large percentage of the undecideds, but so far Huang does not appear to be taking much damage on that front.
Huang is probably the best positioned to get the undecideds. They are less likely to be partisan supporters of a political party, which benefits the independent candidate.
Her likeability and strong credentials for the job are also big pluses in winning those voters.
