Live blogging some results
5:39 Numbers have been on TV for about an hour an and a half now. Some observations:
+ DPP's worst performances --in Taipei city and Taoyuan -- are looking like 36% of the vote. Best performances are hardly over 55% in Chia-yi County. Kaohsiung, Pingtung, and other places where the greens are leading are still split almost 50:50.
+ Percentages at this time are about what I thought before I started to pull the numbers closer in the final week. Apparently, a lot of the "change" in electorate mood was in my head. Numbers stand at about 41%:59% for Ma at this moment.
+ Ma's rapidly nearing the 6.5 million mark of getting more than half of the voters. It's a lock. Hsieh is stuck at 4.5 million at this moment.
+ Turnout was slightly lower than expected, closer to 70% than the predicted 75%. That's a good deal lower than 2000 and 2004 where you had 82% and 80% respectively.
+ Referendums won't be counted until after the presidential election, so it'll be a while before we know what happened.
+ I already got too drunk last night to do it again tonight.
5:49 The current lead is about 1.6 million votes. The KMT itself was predicting a lead of 1.3 million. They outperformed even their own expectations.
+ Ma's leading in 20 cities and counties, with Hsieh leading in 5 -- all south of Yunlin.
+ Taichung didn't go well for us.
+Ma's already crossed the 50% threshold for voter turnout.
5:58 Jiande li 建德里, a small area with a few hundred voters, is historically uncannily accurate at producing over all results. This election was no exception. 215 votes for Ma to Hsieh's 147 , so Ma got 59% ... identical to the current margin.
6:01 Goddamn it, why couldn't the DPP run a real campaign? Why did they basically give the economic issue to Ma by using fear mongering as their only response? And why didn't they spend more time talking about Ma's real flaws and leader sip issues? Why talk about a green card for two months when you don't have any proof?
6:09 Most stations are putting a little victory stamp by Ma's name or otherwise calling the election for him. TVBS is basically live broadcasting the Taichung KMT headquarters celebration. Most other statiosn are doing analysis and trying to avoid being too boring when reading large strings of numbers.
6:16 Thanks to everyone commenting. I also think there's been an absurd amount of blame for everything bad that's happened in the last 8 years on the president -- political, economic, social, everything. Where else in the world does the president get blamed for old people committing suicide?
6:20 Nothing is going to happen until we see just how badly the referendum did, I think. I will force myself to stop posting until we start seeing some referendum numbers.
8 comments:
Game over. It was wishful thinking Hsieh would win - "could" is always a chance, so not worth mentioning. I think some people despise the KMT so much they weren't able to reconcile themselves with the fact they'd almost certainly win.
The DPP needs to rebuild. It came to power at completely the wrong time. It should have got control of the legislative first, but it was forever a minority administration and had to deal with a partial recession. This time it needs to start local and build itself up. It's clear that there's no point in holding the presidency unless they can rely on on legislative support.
Good pt Raj, similar to A-Neoh's pt.
We really saw that in the past 8 years, where KMT spent all their time and resources sabotaging Chen and DPP. No win situation.
Ultimately, the recession and economy punished DPP. Of course, no president KMT/DPP could've pulled Taiwan out the funk.
Hoping KMT doesn't revert to its crooked ways. Another wishful thinking.
@6:01 comment.
Agree. Ma and KMT's atrocious past would have been easy and convincing targets.
His flip flopping of issues, one China aspirations...
But in the end, there's nothing DPP can do. The media is too KMT biased.
The masses were fed this 24/7. Crap in, crap out.
I also think Taiwanese are just too whiny and blame everything on the pres./gov. It was the economy in this case.
I guarantee you nobody truly has an answer.
@ Oxen's 6:16 comment:
I completely agree with you.
Taiwanese people heavily blame the president for everything.
They overlooked the fact that the KMT controlled legislature didn't do jack. Focusing their efforts on attacking the president instead for 8 freakin' years. The KMT deserve just as much blame for Taiwan's troubles.
In the end I think is why DPP lost:
1. Economy
2. Heavily biased media
A bad economy will destroy any president.
The biggest complaint heard was "we can't find jobs, economy is bad..."
nobody is going to blame the legislature for the country's troubles. it's alway the executive who is at fault.
DPP have to rebuild to complete with KMT.
DPP have lost almost every elections since the 1990s ( president, legislative, local level ) Their win in 2000 was due to Blues' split and 2004 under suspicious circumstances.
can you see KMT losing by 2 million votes even if they preformed as badly as DPP in govt?
I think that the referenda will fail and Ma will find that restricts his ability to negotiate with China.
On the economy, I told you that Hsieh couldn't campaign on it because:
a) he couldn't point to anything that great the DPP had done
b) he couldn't blame Chen for the lack-luster performance and say he'd be different because that would have caused deep-greens to stay at home
In many ways Chen did kill off Hsieh's chances because he didn't want anyone to attack his record. Regardless of whether criticism is fair or not, when voters thinks someone hasn't done well they want candidates to attack them. Whether or not that was his choice, Hsieh tried to have his cake and eat it by saying he'd make Taiwan better (i.e. it could be easily better than it is now) without admitting Chen should have done a better job.
Voters don't like loyalty to an unpopular leader.
Neither candidates really touched on their plans to improve the economy. Sure, Ma had his #'s, but never explained how to get there. The numbers mean nothing anyway since we've reached those numbers a few years ago.
So the scary thought is that neither DPP/KMG have solid plans for the economy. By solid I mean sustainable and will help more than just the rich and the biggest companies.
These are tough times since the recession and housing/banking crisis is threatening to drag down the world's economy.
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