The other midterms: What Taiwan’s elections tell us about the island’s future as China looms large

A few weeks after the U.S. midterms, another critical midterm election was held on the other side of the world. On Nov. 26, people in Taiwan went to the polls in what was their first opportunity to weigh in after a tense summer on the island.

In recent months, the prospects of confrontation with mainland China have loomed large in the politics of Taipei, Beijing and in Washington as well. The tensions ratcheted up following a contentious August visit to Taiwan by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that sparked the Chinese government’s anger.

These elections were for local positions — mayors, county chiefs and local councilors — but President Tsai Ing-wen and her Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) did their best to frame the local elections as a referendum on issues pertaining to China, promising that a vote for DPP candidates was a vote for democracy and against Beijing. A vote for their opponents, the KMT, would be just the opposite.

The results suggest that this “big picture” messaging may have backfired: The KMT recorded big wins across county and citywide posts, including the mayoralty of Taipei, won by former Taiwanese president Chiang Kai-shek’s great-grandson.

Following Taiwanese tradition after a major political loss, Tsai stepped down from her role as party leader on Saturday, though she will remain president until her term ends in 2024.

To understand the key takeaways from Taiwan’s midterms — their implications for Taiwan as well as for broader U.S.-China relations — Grid’s China Reporter Lili Pike spoke to Lev Nachman, a political scientist and assistant professor at National Chengchi University in Taipei.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Grid: To start off with, could you explain the significance of the main results on a county and city level, particularly the KMT wins that we saw on Saturday?

Lev Nachman: The significance is that for the last few years, I think that there’s been such popularity internationally around Tsai Ing-wen, the current president of the DPP, that I think from an international perspective, it seemed like they’re the only game in town and that the KMT is failing and struggling to have any sort of electoral victory, especially after their really crushing defeat in 2020. And what these local elections remind us is that the KMT, domestically, still has a strong voter base. Now, that doesn’t mean that everyone in Taiwan is secretly pro-China or is more open to unification. It does not mean that at all. There’s so much polling data that shows that when it comes to the issue of cross-strait relations, which is the most important issue in Taiwan, that the DPP’s policies are still more popular than the KMT’s policies.

But the KMT has more popular local people in office for things like city council and neighborhood leaders. Not only that, but there is a sense of general dissatisfaction with the DPP and some of the choices that they made, not just during the campaign process but also just, I think, a general frustration with things like covid policies or economic growth. But when it comes to the 2024 election, I fully expect the DPP will probably be in a much stronger position then you would expect given how they did in the local elections.

G: In terms of the dissatisfaction with the DPP, do you see concerns over economic growth and covid policies as the main drivers?

LN: So, here’s the thing: We don’t have public opinion data on what exactly was driving voters here. So there’s no way to say for certain what it is that led to people’s dissatisfaction with the DPP. But we can conjecture a couple of disconnects.

For one, the DPP spent a lot of time trying to talk about cross-strait policy, but that kind of fell on deaf ears because these are local elections, your city councilors and mayors don’t really have a say in national security or cross-strait policies in the way that the DPP was describing. They invested a lot of time trying to talk about this, and it ultimately didn’t really motivate any voters; it kind of fell flat. And most of the discourse was around corruption issues, scandals, and very little talk about policy. So, what exactly was the DPP’s agenda this local election? I don’t really know because it was all over the place, depending on what region you’re looking at. Most of the debates, like mayoral candidate debates, were largely talking about attacking opponents. Some tried to talk about policy but weren’t particularly successful at keeping it center stage.

G: What do you attribute the KMT’s strength in these elections to?

LN: Taiwan is a relatively young democracy; it only democratized 20, 30 years ago. This means the KMT, the former authoritarian party, still has a lot of very strong networks throughout the country, and it’s still able to tap into those networks for local elections. Not only that, but as is true of any democracy, the opposition party have an easier time in the midterms. And the same applies in Taiwan.

G: For people on the outside, seeing that Tsai has stepped down as the head of the party might be hard to understand. Can you explain how this has happened again, why she felt the need to step down, and what that means practically for the government?

LN: It’s pretty typical in Taiwan that after a very big defeat, the party leader steps down, sort of accepting that it’s largely their responsibility for the party’s poor performance in an election. And this isn’t the first time Tsai has stepped down, she did so during the last previous major losses [in 2018]. What this means for the party going forward is that Tsai’s ability to influence internal politics will be much more limited. And she was going to step down eventually anyway, because her term is up in a year. But this kind of fast-forwards that process much more quickly. The reason it matters is because who’s going to be nominated for president next? And who’s going to be nominated for not just president, but all the other positions in the Legislative Yuan, the Taiwanese congress? That’s really what’s going to be influenced by her no longer being in the room while a lot of these decisions are being made.

G: But just to be clear, her role as president isn’t affected in the interim?

LN: Oh, no. Think of it like stepping down from being the leader of the DNC or the RNC, versus president of the United States.

G: You referred to the jockeying going into 2024. Do you see any takeaways for who might be favored going into 2024 as candidates, and relative support for the two parties compared to 2020?

LN: Yes, so William Lai is the current vice president, and he’s the one who’s most likely to get the nomination. And given how bad the KMT is at running national elections, I anticipate that Lai may be a very strong contender to be the next president in Taiwan.

G: And what might a Lai presidency look like compared to what we’ve seen with Tsai Ing-wen?

LN: So that’s what everyone is very eager to know. Tsai has been an extremely levelheaded, moderate politician who has not shaken the boat. She’s been the best DPP president that the United States and the PRC could have ever asked for. She never tried to change Taiwan’s de facto status, she never really tried to push the status quo in a certain direction. And internationally, she will be very missed among world leaders. And everyone is very curious if William Lai will be Tsai 2.0 or if he will become a different version of a Taiwanese president.

G: Any early indications from his past role as VP?

LN: He’s been controversial in the past because he’s made a lot of very blatantly pro-independence comments in the past. And he’s worked very hard to walk a lot of those back these days, to say, you know, “No, no, you misunderstood me, I mean just what the DPP party line is,” etc. Revisionist is perhaps a bit of an overstatement, but he’s definitely trying to account for things he said in the past to put leaders at ease that he’s not going to be a boat-rocker if he’s president.

G: You referred to the implications for the U.S. with a potential Lai presidency. But are there any immediate implications coming out of these local elections for U.S. policy toward Taiwan?

LN: No, this won’t change any U.S.-Taiwan policies. I do believe the results will be a bit of a shock for D.C., because like I said, I think a lot of perception in Washington, D.C., is that the DPP is the only game in town and the KMT doesn’t know what they’re doing. And I think D.C. will be a little bit shocked that the KMT is still able to perform as strongly as they do domestically in spite of their poor performance during national elections.

G: What convinces you so much that the KMT will ultimately lose in 2024?

LN: Because they still haven’t figured out how to talk about China in a way that is appealing to Taiwanese voters. They struggle with a lot of the big jargon words here: ’92 Consensus, One China Policy, One China Principle, how to establish relations with the PRC as the ROC [or Republic of China, Taiwan’s official name] without giving up any sort of sovereignty for Taiwan. You can get by in local elections without having to talk about these big issues, but when it comes to national elections, these issues are front and center. And if you look at the last two to three presidential elections, that’s where the KMT has fallen short.

G: Do you see the KMT trying at all to change that message and trying to find a more appealing one?

LN: They haven’t. We’ve been waiting, but it seems every time someone in the KMT tries to come along who says, “Maybe we should update how we talk about these things,” they get shut down by the old guard very quickly.

G: Is there anything else that you think is interesting and important for readers to understand about the election results?

LN: I would just really, really emphasize that the local elections are much more about Taiwanese evaluating the quality of these two big parties and the candidates within these parties. It’s a lot more about Taiwanese identity and party identity, and very little to do with China. If you’re very unfamiliar with Taiwanese politics and you just connect the dots, you might say, well, in August, you had these big military threats, and now the KMT is doing really well in local elections, does that mean that the military threats are pushing people to go vote for the KMT? I would understand why you would arrive at that conclusion, but that would be emphatically wrong. The local election results can be explained infinitely better by understanding domestic contexts about the KMT’s candidates versus the DPP’s candidates than they can by Chinese military threats in August.

An earlier version of this article misstated where the KMT won a mayoralty. This version has been corrected.

Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.