Analysis: Voters Sent Message To Uphold 2024 Results in Mass Lawmaker Recalls

TaiwanPlus News

With recall votes against all 24 opposition Kuomintang lawmakers having failed, political analyst Courtney Donovan Smith says that voters rejected the use of recalls as a political tool in Taiwan.

Transcript

00:00The recall vote against all 24 Kuomintang lawmakers failed today.

00:05So what does this mean for the Kuomintang leadership and the Democratic Progressive

00:08Party leadership moving forward?

00:12Today the voters spoke unambiguously.

00:16It's now clear that trying to use the recall laws as a political tactic has failed in a

00:29mass sort of way against a political party.

00:33It also, I think, unambiguously underscored that the voters within these districts wanted

00:40to underscore and reaffirm their choices that were made in the January 2024 election and

00:46send a loud and clear message that they didn't want their choices overturned.

00:53Now this, I think, is going to give, this is a very big, I guess you could say, show support

01:04for the KMT.

01:07I believe that they may interpret this in a way that everything that they have done or

01:14said has been underscored as correct.

01:19But I do think that if they do so, that might be overstepping their boundaries.

01:23So they may want to dial it back a little bit.

01:27Fundamentally, the DPP is going to have to do some soul searching.

01:33This was not initiated by them.

01:35It was not their campaign.

01:37But they did support it.

01:38And I'm certain that they were quite hopeful in the results.

01:43And this was definitely not what they were hoping for.

01:47Voter turnout in most districts exceeded 50 percent, which is quite high for a non-presidential

01:52election.

01:53What's your takeaway?

01:55Well, what's very interesting about this is that if you looked at polls, generally speaking,

02:01the majority were opposed to the recall votes.

02:04However, there were certain districts where you had just general voters, where the number

02:13that said they were voting to agree to the recall, for example, Xu Chaoxin's district,

02:20the number that said that they supported recalling her was actually slightly higher than the percentage that said they didn't.

02:29And when you looked at likely voters, the percentage that said they were going to come out and vote to recall her was strikingly

02:35higher than the number who said they were going to vote and were going to support her.

02:42But it looks like the general numbers across the board were more accurate.

02:47But now, when you looked at the 12.

02:48Thank you for participating.

02:55So, thank you.

02:56Here we go.

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