Sunday, January 27, 2008

How Much Would the DPP Have Needed? One last look at the numbers..

I was riding home last night after Chaon & Co. creamed my son and I in Axis and Allies, and got to thinking about the legislative election again (imagine that, if you can!). This time I decided to figure out how many votes the DPP would have needed to make a substantial increase in the number of seats won.

Now, obviously, if the DPP total increases by 400,000, those votes won't be spread evenly throughout the island. The growth would be uneven. To weight the numbers, I assumed that any growth in the vote would reflect the extant situation in the district, and thus be proportional to it. For example, if a DPP candidate in District X received 10% of the entire DPP vote, then that same candidate would receive 10% of any increased vote. Naturally this is only a rough assumption, but it is a guide to what-might-have-been.

To do this I first downloaded the vote totals for each district from the CEC database. The overall constituent vote totals are here, with the DPP receiving 3,765,222 votes, and the KMT, 5,209,237. Those represent total votes for all candidates, not votes for the party. I then eliminated all other candidates, leaving only the KMT and the DPP, in most cases (in one or two cases there was no DPP candidate, or the DPP opponent was from the NPSU).

In the chart above, the first three columns are pretty self-explanatory. The fourth column represents the ratio of the DPP vote in that district to the entire DPP constituency vote. For example, in the first line, in Kaohsiung City 1, the DPP obtained 65,266 votes, representing .0173 of the entire DPP vote (1.73%). I took the first four digits, without rounding.

The next column contains two numbers. The first number is the difference between the KMT and DPP vote (KMT minus DPP). The second number is the size of the overall DPP vote increase necessary to generate enough votes in that district for the DPP candidate to overcome the KMT candidate. Again, in Kaohsiung City 1, the DPP candidate received 1.73% of the DPP vote. To generate enough votes to overcome a 27,151 vote deficit, the DPP would have had to poll another 1.6 million votes (1600000 x .0173 = 27,680). No doubt there are some errors, I probably should not be doing math after midnight with a couple of beers in me.

Of course, this also assumes that the KMT vote stays constant, which is obviously not the case. Had the DPP polled more voters, the KMT would have been out trying to stimulate even more people to come out. But I'm assuming away that effect, so we can try and get a glimpse of what-might-have-been.

For simplicity's sake, I incremented the vote totals by 100,000. I also did not look at areas where the DPP did not run a candidate, and I ignored Jinmen and Matsu since there is no way the DPP will ever win there. To understand this, looking at the first line, if the DPP picks up an additional 200,000 votes, it will pick up the seat in Kaohsiung County 4. If it increases 400,000 votes, it gains a total of three seats (Kaohsiung City 4, Kaohsiung County 4, and Taipei County 4).

200,000
Kaohsiung County 4

400,000
Kaohsiung City 4
Taipei County 4

500,000
Taipei County 5
Changhua County 4

600,000
Kaohsiung City 3
Taipei City 2
Ilan
Taichung County 1

700,000
Kaohsiung County 1
Chiayi City

900,000
Taoyuan County 2
Taichung County 3

1,100,000
Yunlin County 2
Penghu
Taichung City 3

1,200,000
Changhua County 3
Pingtung County 2

1,300,000
Taipei County 6
Taipei County 7
Yunlin County 1

1,400,000
Taipei County 1
Taichung County 5
Chiayi County 1

1,500,000
Miaoli County 1

1,600,000
Kaohsiung City 1
Taipei City 5
Nantou County 2

1,800,000
Taipei County 1

1,900,000
Taipei County 8

2,000,000
Taipei County 10

2,200,000
Taipei City 1
Taipei City 3
Taichung City 1

2,300,000
Hsinchu City
Taichung City 2

2,500,000
Changhua County 2

2,600,000
Taoyuan County 1
Taoyuan County 4

2,900,000
Taipei City 4
Taoyuan County 3

3,900,000
Taoyuan County 6

4,000,000
Taipei City 6
Taichung County 2
Nantou County 1

4,100,000
Taipei City 7
Taoyuan County 5

5,500,000
Taipei County 11

4,400,000
Changhua County 1

5,000,000
HUalien

5,300,000
Keelung

6,600,000
Taipei City 8

8,000,000
Miaoli County 2

Based on these figures, the DPP would have had to pick up another 700,000 votes or so to gain an additional ten seats and reach a total of 40 (with the proportional at-large seats). That would have meant a roughly 20% increase in the vote total, to 4.4 million DPP votes, a figure it has never gotten within shouting distance of. If the DPP had picked up another 1.6 million votes (to 5.3 million votes), a nearly 50% increase, then it would have picked up another 28 or 29 seats.

What was the effect of the TSU? In 2004 the TSU took 750,000 votes, this time around, according to the CEC, just 93,000 people voted for the TSU, concentrated in just three areas. The DPP was unable to grab the missing TSU voters (or perhaps it did and core DPP vote plummeted, without solid survey work, there's no way to know). Even worse, in one case, Chiayi City, the TSU candidate took 14,000 votes, while the DPP candidate lost by 7,000 (in no other district did I notice the TSU having a serious impact). It's often assumed that TSU voters would switch to the DPP in the absence of a TSU candidate, but recall that the TSU was brought out of the KMT by Lee Teng-hui, and some of those voters may have returned to their Blue roots this election. Others couldn't be bothered to come out (Lazy? Angered?). Clearly, the DPP's failure to smoothly absorb the TSU and collect all its votes, the way the KMT eliminated the PFP and incorporated all its voters, potentially cost the DPP. However, in 2004 the TSU took 756,000 votes (CEC), but the geographical distribution is telling: 390,491 of those votes were concentrated in Taipei City, Taipei County, Kaohsiung City, Kaohsiung County, and Taoyuan -- mostly places where the DPP was not competitive, or where it didn't need votes. On the other hand, the DPP lost both Yunlin seats by a total of 38,000 votes -- and the TSU had 33,000 votes there in 2004 (no votes in 2008).

RE the young: I just wrote this to a friend:

It's funny because I was pretty long-term optimistic too, but I made an error, the famous DUNE error -- remember, when Duke Leto errs in trusting, because he thought anyone who hated Harkonnens would never betray him? Heh. That's what I did. I assumed that the rising Taiwan identity among the young would make them shift to the DPP over time, but I suspect it has had the opposite effect -- because they are pro-Taiwan they feel safe voting for KMT candidates.

Enjoy. Discuss. Dissect.

UPDATE: The Taipei Times published my thumbnail analysis of the election.

15 comments:

eighty said...

You guys STILL discussing this, Thinking wishful?

Man - Get it through your heads - The DPP message is racist, divisive, hateful and revenge - Its the WRONG message for Taiwan that its citizens (thankfuly) have woken up and realized is Baaaadddddd!

The DPP is dead!

Eli said...

More great work, Michael. I have often heard that Taipei is somehow an exception in Taiwan, or is not the real Taiwan, but judging from the numbers, it doesn't seem to be that different from everywhere else. There were a number of close races in both Taipei City and Taipei County. Of course, there were areas in Taipei where KMT candidates won by large margins, but that doesn't seem too much different than what happened in Taichung and Changhua. I think that living in Taipei, and moving about in different neighborhoods, it becomes fairly clear which are the more green-leaning districts and which are the more blue-leaning ones. For instance, there is a big difference getting off the metro at Shuanglian and getting off at the City Government. However, DPP candidates still lost in many of these seemingly green areas, which seems to duplicate cross-island patterns. It also strikes me that there were many areas throughout Taiwan were KMT candidates won by large margins, but generally when the DPP candidate won, it was by a small margin. Well, there are some thoughts by a non-expert.

Michael Fahey said...

Michael's analysis of the number shows how things could have been much closer if:

1. The TSU had returned to the DPP fold without having attempted to survive as a European socialist party. Taiwan is clearly not reay for this kind of party.

2. There had been a higher turnout


3. The DPP had not turned some voters off by overplaying the identity card in a misguided effort to mobilize its base in the short term.

4. Half or so of the voters who wasted their vote on third parties such as the Greens had voted DPP.

Michael also had a good letter to the editor today in which he rejects the proposition that this drubbing will somehow be good for the DPP. He's right. It won't. And the reason that it won't is that there had been a debate between the DPP's left wing and its more pragmatic politicians such as Suabout whether the DPP was losing votes because it had abandoned its roots in Taiwan's "Social Movements." That debate will now end, and Su, who is undoubtedly the DPP's future star, will go to work building the DPP's patronage machine that will work in much the same way as the KMT's does.

The DPP will have to bring home the bacon on the local level if it is to win legislative elections. That will mean an end to limited DPP support for labor, the environment, and other progressive causes. The DPP is going to have to get its hands dirtier in local retail politics to stay in the game.

On the national level, it needs a burst of new ideas.

Anonymous said...

Nothing please the losers when in the first place, they ain't winners in the first place. Yeh, I am referring to the previous elections 2000 and 2004 when DPP was just plain lucky to get through within a thin minority votes. DPP can shout the louder, create havoc in LY but put it nicely, they are all and above, a 2nd rated party, not worthy to shed a tear or two even if they lose.

Michael Turton said...

Wulingren...

I too was struck by the large KMT margins and the smaller DPP margins of victory -- and also by the huge turnout they'd need to draw even with the KMT. They lost in traditionally Green areas, but I think people tend to overestimate how Green some of those Green areas are.

Michael

JZ said...

What effect does celebrity endorsement of KMT have? For example, famous Taiwan singers such as Wang Lee Hom, David Tao, Jolin Tsai, and even Jay Chou are pro-blue and do not hide their sympathy.

Eli said...

Zyzyx,

I think that's a good question, especially in terms of the youth vote, but I leave that to those more informed than me to answer. I also wonder if the support of Freddy from Chthonic for Frank Hsieh will help to counter this, though I would argue that he is a much different, and more talented, type of musician than the others, not because he is green, just because he is. It is also more important to them that they have access to the China market and blue media, and my guess is that support of green candidates would cut off that access.

Eli said...

Michael,

True, people probably do overestimate the greenness of those areas, but is the same true for so-called blue areas, or are those just more stable in their blueness? I mean look at the results in Hsinchu, Taoyuan, and Miaoli. Is there anything the DPP could do to alter that? Does Yeh Chu-lan campaigning there have any effect?

I was talking to someone from Miaoli the other day, and I asked her which politicians were popular there. She mentioned James Soong, because he did a lot for people there. Isn't "he did a lot for people there" another way of saying "he brought home the bacon?"

Anonymous said...

If interpreted sarcastically by the corrupted DPP mindset, pan Blues including all the celebrities, will eventually sell Taiwan to China for a song.

Michael Fahey said...

Wuling

Your questions are addressed to Michael, but I'll take a crack at a few of them.

1. Soong in Miaoli. In Soong's case, he really brought the bacon home--perhaps no more striking example is on record. Soong showered funds on local supporters throughout Taiwan when he was provincial governor and in doing so created a patronage network and a party ot of nothing. Significantly, he did so across ethnic lines and did especially well in gaining Hakka and aboriginal support. Understanding Soong's rise is the key to understanding local retail politics in Taiwan. Soong despite a massive charisma deficit, was a master at it, and probably would have succeeded in becoming president if he had not run up against the even more formidable LTH.

2. Freddy is a non-entity in the entertainment world compared to the likes of Jolin and Jay Chou. Although those stars are vaguely blue, they also have to think about their green fans. Generally, I think they try not to offend too many people. So I don't think their pandering to China has much effect on politics.

The DPP engages in shameless celeb candidates when it gets the chance--example, the tawdry candidacy and victory of Yu Tien in San Chong for the DPP. Yu, who has blighted TV screens for decades, is notorious for his gangster connections including the White Wolf and his younger brother who was executed in Xiamen for heroin distribution a few years ago. His wife's sickbed performance before the election was worthy of the Philippines.

Eli said...

Very interesting comments, Feiren, especially about James Soong. I remember my first landlord in Taiwan about ten years ago, who grew up in Tainan but had been living in Taipei for several years and was very much opposed to the KMT, saying that she liked Soong.

As for Jolin, I have a hard time believing that she is very political either way. Wang Leehom, on the other hand, refusing to appear on stage in Kaohsiung with Chen Shui-bian et al. might have had an effect. I don't know. True, Freddy is not on the same level in the local music scene as the others, but he is probably a lot more political than them, and having toured with Ozzy Osbourne, might just be more well-known internationally, at last among head-bangers.

Anonymous said...

Just read the Taipei Times letter, which was fine except for this one point: there doesn't seem to be any evidence that there was any gerrymandering at all. Michael, you've done a lot of stats here, so you're not ignorant of how to work it out. If the KMT get 60% of the vote, in a first-past-the-post system they should end up with over 80% of the seats. That's just the way the figures work. Assume a normal distribution for voting patterns (wrong, but it'll do); guess at a standard deviation; plug the figures in.

Anonymous said...

At Trace:
It's the KMT that invented the
waisheng identity and cultivated it through affirmative action at universities, government posts, jobs, teaching positions, the posts in the Kuomintang. Being waisheng used to mean something. It meant you had the right accent, you had more money, you had social prestige... how can you be blaming the DPP for a KMT social construction that was indoctrinated into Taiwanese society for 50 years?

The old retired soldiers, waisheng of many ages all have come out from under the woodwork since the KMT election victory--they talk loudly everywhere yelling their political opinions, wearing their "red white and blue" and walking with a spring in their step.

The majority of KMT voters were not voting for a waisheng/Zhonghua Minguo/Chinese nationalist identity, and it's just going to piss off bensheng voters for the presidential election.

Michael Turton said...

Phil:

There were three separate factors that magnified the KMT victory, looking at the districts and the vote. First, the winner take all districts, as you correct note. Second, gerrymandering. I can show it with math but I'm still working on the post. The third is the at-large seats -- they really magnify the effect of victory, because they effectively hand the small party seats over to the largest two parties. All three conspired together to turn 60% of the votes into 80% of the seats.

Michael

Anonymous said...

Wow~you, a foreigner, can talk about the politics of Taiwan so clearly~~how amazing!!
The DPP only got 2 in the northen Taiwan & half in the southern Taiwan. I fthe KMT can not only win the parliamentrian election, but can also win in the next campaign, hope will come into everyone's hearts.