Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) would lead her Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) opponent, Deputy Legislative Speaker Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱), by nearly 30 percentage points if they are the only two participants in next year’s presidential election, according to a poll released by the Taiwan Thinktank yesterday.
The survey predicted that Tsai would garner 54.2 percent of votes against Hung’s 24.6 percent if they were to compete one-on-one in January’s election.
While Tsai’s support would decline to 43.8 percent if People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) enters the race, she would still maintain a wide margin against Sung’s 21.7 percent and Hung’s 21.6 percent.
The survey was released as the KMT confirmed Hung as its presidential candidate during its party congress in Taipei yesterday afternoon.
Meanwhile, in regional legislative elections, the survey showed that the DPP enjoyed the highest amount of support at 27.8 percent, followed by the KMT with 20.3 percent, the third political force with 5.2 percent and the PFP with 4.3 percent.
Support for the DPP increased to 35.6 percent when respondents were asked which party they would cast a party vote for, while the KMT and PFP received 24.6 percent and 9.2 percent respectively.
Commenting on the results, Soochow University associate professor of political science Hsu Yung-ming (徐永明) — a member of the recently formed New Power Party (NPP) — said Soong’s perceived willingness to run for president has greatly boosted the momentum for his party.
“However, the third political force’s failure to present a presidential candidate could lead to them being left out or marginalized in the upcoming race. It is vital that they focus on issues conducive to heating up the legislative elections,” Hsu said.
Asked to rate their level of support for Taiwanese independence on a scale from zero to 10 — zero signifying a desire for immediate cross-strait unification and 10 for immediate independence — respondents returned an average score of 5.8.
Respondents were of the opinion that Tsai is leaning toward independence, as reflected by the score of 6.4 they gave her, while Soong and Hung received 4.4 and 3.4 respectively.
In addition, about 62.7 percent of those polled believed that Soong could maintain the cross-strait “status quo,” while 60.1 percent said they were more confident in Tsai’s ability to do so.
Meanwhile, 40.4 percent of respondents said Hung was favoring unification with China.
Political affiliation did not seem to be a factor when asked about allowing one political party to control both the Presidential Office and the Legislative Yuan, with 52.7 percent of those polled being against it, while 36.5 percent were in favor.
“The results of the poll could be due to President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) lackluster performance and the legislative chaos that occurred during his time in office, despite the KMT being fully in control of both branches of the government,” Taiwan Thinktank deputy executive director Lai I-chung (賴怡忠) said.
The telephone-based poll collected 1,112 valid samples and was conducted on Wednesday and Thursday last week. It has a confidence level of 95 percent and a margin of error of 3 percentage points.
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