https://frozengarlic.wordpress.com/2022/11/28/reactions-to-the-2022-elections/
Reactions to the 2022 elections
Turnout is a complex phenomenon, and it seems implausible to me that the decision to vote or stay home was divided neatly along party lines. It’s more likely that this was a low turnout election in which voters of all persuasions decided to sit it out. Sure, there may have been more DPP sympathizers who stayed home, but it is far more likely that the next million people to vote would have been split 55-45 than 95-5.
The point here is that Hou was soaking up all the blue votes, almost all of the neutral votes, and a few of the green votes. You can see this most clearly in District 4 (Sanchong and Luzhou). This is the greenest area in New Taipei, but Hou won it by 12%, around 30,000 votes. However, in the city council races, if you add 24,000 votes won by a blue-affiliated independent candidate to the KMT total, the DPP CC candidates beat the blue CC candidates by about 30,000 votes. There was clearly some split-ticket voting going on here.
For the last several years, I have dismissed the 2018 election as a one-time aberration grounded in several unique factors including Tsai’s dismal approval ratings, Han’s populist rhetoric and ability to talk about China as a market in a slightly new and different way, and a strange short-term downturn in Taiwanese identity. None of those factors were present in 2022, yet the electoral results were similar. It is no longer tenable to simply brush away 2018 as an outlier.