TAICHUNG (Taiwan News) — Taiwan’s national elections are ten months away, and primaries for candidates will start happening in the weeks to come, while major parties should have their tickets finalized by some time in June.

However, there are some curious political shifts taking place that defy conventional wisdom. For example, it is generally assumed younger voters support the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) and former Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are poaching voters almost exclusively from the light-blue Kuomintang (KMT) support base.

Four polls have come out in just nine days on the upcoming presidential race. All of them tested support in a hypothetical three-way race for Vice President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), New Taipei Mayor Hou Yu-ih (侯友宜) of the Kuomintang (KMT), and Ko Wen-je of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP).

Lai and Ko are already declared to be running for president, so some of the polls included other options for the KMT candidate including Terry Gou (郭台銘) and Eric Chu (朱立倫). Two-way matchups with Ko not in the race were also included.

The first was a poll released on March 10 by Taiwan’s Broadcasting Corporation of China (BCC) with Gallup. It was the only one to include assumed vice presidential candidates.

Poll results

It matched Lai with Vice Premier Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) and together they got 36.45% of the vote, followed by the rather unlikely though not impossible combination of Terry Gou and Ko Wen-je snagging 23.59% and pulling up the rear was a Hou Yu-ih and Eric Chu combo at 18.23%.

I think all three of those vice presidential picks are not the most likely ones, so the poll is not necessarily very useful, but I included it because it is interesting.

Next out was a poll carried out on March 13-14 by Z.Media (震傳媒), which is reportedly affiliated with the KMT. According to the poll, Lai was favored by 39.3% of voters, followed by Hou's 27.8% and former Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je's (柯文哲) 18.2%.

There were some warning signs for the KMT in this poll, only 65% of pan-blue poll respondents saying they would cast their vote for Hou, which is really low. Hou even lost to Lai in New Taipei, the city he is mayor of.

Then we get to the My-Formosa poll conducted on March 17-18. It has Lai with a slight lead at 33.7%, with Hou at 32.2% and Ko and 20.9%.

Helpfully, My-Formosa provides graphics showing the results from previous polls, and this showed that Hou gained over 10% support between October and December of last year, putting him ahead of Lai for the first time, probably propelled by the KMT’s landslide victory in last November’s local elections. However, this latest poll saw him shed 7.7%, putting him only about three or four points higher than he had been polling up to last October.

Interestingly, Ko’s trajectory was a partial mirror opposite of Hou, losing nearly 6% of his support between October and December last year, but bounced up 8.2% to breach 20% for the first time for his highest over showing.

A temporally challenged poll

The final poll is from Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation (TPOF) and is dated March 21, which is quite remarkable considering that this column is being written on March 19 and I’m looking right at it. Unlike the other three, this one has Hou ahead at 32.4%, Lai at 27.7%, and Ko at 19.5%.

Curiously, this poll shows a counter-trend to the other three, with Hou gaining 1% since January to move ahead of Lai, Lai losing a surprising 6.3% to drop into second place and Ko dropping 2.8%. However, when compared to December, it comes closer to the My-Formosa poll, showing Hou having lost 6.3%, Lai having lost 1.3% and Ko up 1.7%.

One question I’ve been pondering is where is the support for Ko and the TPP actually coming from? The assumption has been from light blue and independent voters.

Since no pollster asks where Ko or TPP voters would go if they did not have either as an option, I compared the polling for the three-way matchups with the two-way matchups that leave off Ko to see where his voters go.

In the Z.Media poll, his 18.2% is split with 12.3% going to Hou and 5.1% or 28% going to Lai. In the My-Formosa poll, Ko’s 20.9% went to Hou at 14.7% and 6.5% or 31% to Lai.

In the temporally-challenged TPOF poll, his 19.5% is divided up with 15% going to Hou and 5% or 25.6% to Lai. In all three cases, I used the comparison with Hou rather than Chu or Gou because Hou is the party’s strongest potential candidate, has a bland personality and has the highest broad appeal with the public, whereas the other two have personalities that polarize public opinion and people may not support them for those reasons rather than party or ideology.

More green support for Ko

I should caution that this demonstrates which other people Ko’s votes would go to and probably does not 100% correlate to political parties, but both Hou and Lai are bland avatars of their parties and do not provoke a lot of animosity, plus Taiwan voters tend to vote along partisan lines more often than that. It is highly suggestive, if not definitive proof, that some support for Ko and perhaps the TPP is coming from pan-green leaning independents and possibly light greens.

If those numbers are ballpark correct, it would suggest that the numbers are between one-quarter and one-third. Though it has always been known that Ko has some pan-green support (especially back in 2014 during the Taipei mayoral race), but this suggests it is a bit higher than the general narrative would have it.

In the My-Formosa poll, detailed breakdowns of the data are posted allowing for more detailed analysis, and in age demographics there are some numbers that overturn the standard assumptions. Interestingly, though, if you followed the campaigns of TPP-backed independent Vivian Huang (黃珊珊) in the last Taipei mayoral race and TPP candidate Ann Kao (高虹安) in the Hsinchu mayoral race, then you will not actually be surprised.

There is a common pattern between those two races and Ko, and that is they are dominantly popular in the 20-29 demographic, strong in the 30-39 demographic, but as age rises their popularity falls off a cliff. Among 20-29 year-olds, Ko dominates with 44.8% support, with Hou in second at 22.8%, and coming in last Lai only got 21.9%.

In the 30-39 demographic, Ko also leads with 33.7%, Lai comes in a closer second at 30.7%, and Hou garners 26.8%. Among 40-49 year-olds, Lai pulls ahead with 34.3%, but Ko plunges to last at only 20%.

It is only in the 50-59 demographic that Hou leads, with 44.4%, Lai at 28.6% and Ko at 13.6%. Lai dominates the 60-69 and 70+ demographics with well over 40%, Hou is in the mid-30s and Ko gets only 10.3% and a shocking 2.8%, respectively.

DPP has lost 20-29 demographic

So much for the common assumption that the youth will support the DPP like in previous elections. That no doubt explains the extensive outreach Lai has been conducting with youth “KOL” (key opinion leaders) recently.

There are several possible reasons why the 20-29 age group is so strikingly different than even the 30-39 demographic. One appears to be that they are simply fed up with the two existing main parties, finding them out of touch, divisive, stale, old or some combination of those factors.

Clearly, they want something different, which is why they backed Vivian Huang and Ann Kao so strongly, and Ko Wen-je now. Another factor may be that most of them were children during the Sunflower movement, which led to a significant move by young people at the time into the pan-green camp.

Having missed that movement, they also missed many of the reasons why younger people at the time became so pan-green. That movement focused people’s minds on Taiwanese identity, Taiwan sovereignty and the threat posed by China.

Ko’s talk of “two sides of the Strait are one family” and other moves many consider more pro-China does not appear to be causing alarm bells to ring in the way that it does with older voters.