Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chairman and presidential candidate Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) yesterday said that the TPP cannot accept the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) demand for it to yield a 6 percentage point support rate in opinion polls, but added it would continue to negotiate on their coalition for the January presidential election.
The KMT and the TPP were originally scheduled to announce at 10am yesterday the aggregated result of opinion polls to decide who would lead in their joint presidency bid, but they suddenly called a halt, as the two parties failed to reach a consensus on the interpretation of opinion poll results.
At a news conference at 10:30am, Ko’s campaign office spokesperson Vicky Chen (陳智菡) said that the TPP has agreed to yielding 3 percentage points in polls to New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜), the KMT’s presidential candidate, upon which a joint ticket being a Ko-Hou ticket or a Hou-Ko ticket would be decided.
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
However, the KMT claims that the TPP should yield 6 percentage points, which would result in the Hou-led ticket winning in five of the six opinion polls, she said, adding that the two sides could not reach an agreement, with the discussion therefore being dismissed at about 2:20am yesterday, leading to the 10am announcement being canceled.
Chen said that Trend Survey’s opinion poll showed that the Ko-Hou team-up received 48.3 percent support, compared with the 39.2 percent obtained by the Democratic Progressive Party’s presidential candidate, Vice President William Lai (賴清德), along with his presumptive running mate, Representative to the US Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴); the difference between them is 9.1 percentage points.
The same poll showed that the Hou-Ko team-up received 46.1 percent support, compared with the Lai-Hsiao team-up with 41.6 percent, a difference of 4.5 percentage points, she said, adding that the difference between the first and second group of comparisons is 4.6 percentage points.
While the margin of error for each poll is different, not always exactly 3 percentage points, 4.6 percentage points is still larger than the 2.17 percentage points margin of error for this poll, so the Ko-led ticket should win this poll, she said.
Citing the numbers from the United Daily News’ poll, Chen said the difference between the first and second group of comparisons was zero, so Ko yielded and allowed the Hou-led ticket to win the poll, and the aggregated result of the six polls should be a draw of three to three, but the KMT would not accept it.
Ko said that the KMT first proposed to form a “blue-white (KMT-TPP)” alliance about six months ago.
“I at the time said a blue-white alliance is acceptable, but there must be a fair method of conducting opinion polls, and I also proposed to hold three debate sessions before conducting public polling, then I proposed only comparing public polls, but they [the KMT] also refused,” he said.
“At the end, aside from asking us to yield 3 percentage points to Hou, we were also asked to have both of us [Hou and Ko] on the same ticket,” he said. “On Wednesday, I agreed to yield the 3 percentage points ... which led to my aides bursting into tears.”
“Unexpectedly, at the meeting on Friday night the KMT demanded that we yield 6 percentage points,” he said.
“You [the KMT] are not trying to beat Ko Wen-je today, but to defeat Lai in the presidential election, and in the real election, Lai would not yield even 0.01 percentage points,” Ko said.
“Frankly speaking, asking us to yield 6 percentage points is beyond the public’s common sense,” Ko said.
Meanwhile, Ko said that since the KMT-TPP meeting on Wednesday, some political talk shows have accused him of being forced to concede to the terms of agreement because he was threatened by the Chinese Communist Party.
“If anyone continues to spread that rumor, I will file a lawsuit against them for aggravated libel,” Ko said.
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