Who wins Taipei's mayoral race: Chiang Wan-an or Puma Shen?
A disputed poll sample fuels debate over how close Taipei’s mayor race truly is
Taipei, Taiwan's capital, has long been hard for the party that now governs Taiwan to win, and its mayor, Chiang Wan-an, looked safe for a second term. Then a September 22 poll put his challenger, Puma Shen, almost level. Polymarket prices a Shen win at a 19% probability, up from under 8% a month ago.
On November 28, Taipei's voters choose their next mayor. Chiang belongs to the Kuomintang (KMT), the opposition party Taipei leans toward. Shen is a lawmaker for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which governs Taiwan but has won this job only once, in 1994.
In 2022, Chiang took 42.29% of the vote, the DPP's candidate 31.93%, and Huang Shan-shan, backed by the smaller Taiwan People's Party (TPP), 25.14%. So two in three voters skipped the DPP.
Shen, picked on May 13, has been catching up anyway. An August poll by the TPOC research center cut Chiang's lead to 15.4 points. But it also found 63.3% of Huang's 2022 voters backing Chiang and only 27.3% backing Shen.
The reason why this matters is that this year the TPP has no candidate for mayor. It is campaigning with the KMT instead, so most of the two-in-three who skipped the DPP last time now back Chiang.
The September 22 poll then put Chiang at 41.7% and Shen at 40.5%. But a poll only works if the people it asks are a fair mix of voters. This one asked more supporters of the DPP side than of the KMT and TPP sides combined, by 36.6% to 33.8%.
Even Chen Shui-bian, the former president who won that 1994 race for the DPP, called the poll's choice of people “a bit strange, as if it had some other purpose.” In other words, a leading figure on Shen's side doubts the poll.
Still, Shen's climb is real. Earlier this year, almost half of voters did not know he was running, so he had room to grow.
We think one poll with the wrong mix of voters does not outweigh how Taipei votes. It seems the market is still giving Shen more credit than he has earned. And with most TPP voters behind Chiang, we expect him to win a second term on November 28.
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