@AngelicaOung @RnaudBertrand @BonnieGlaser @RossFeingold @PaulHuangReport @jose Let me be a conspiracy nut for a bit, and say that this feels like a "Zelensky 2.0" operation coming out of Langley. You see the same sort of information warfare stuff.

One fascinating thing is that at the Party Chairman level, neither Lai nor Cheng have really organized large national campaigns. Lai is unusual since he comes from a very safe seat, and in 2024, he ran a very conservative campaign (do nothing and let the KMT self-destruct).

So let me tell you what I hope happens (and I am a deep blue guy). I am hoping that the support for Shen is not real because if it turns out to be not real, when you have a lot of DPP candidates that are going to be very angry at Lai and Shen,

@BonnieGlaser @RossFeingold @AngelicaOung One other weird thing about Taiwan politics is that the candidates are not nominated by any systematic process as in the US, but it is all ad-hoc which include internal polls. People tried to do a pure primary system, but never worked.

@AngelicaOung @RossFeingold @BonnieGlaser One thing about polling is how they affect electoral strategy. One fascinating thing is that adverse polls won't directly affect what Chiang and Puma themselves do. Chiang might look at focus groups and opinion polls, but he is going

The 17 percent lead is big news because even green supporters find it suspect. One thing that the poll takers mentioned is that they might be running into "blue silence". I.e. because the news has been about Green winning, then when a blue supporter gets called, they hang up.

@CarlMinzner @michaelxpettis @BradSetser @CFR_org @SanderTordoir @philippilk @RushDoshi As France is burning and the world is about run out of oil, that the best minds in America are spending their intellect trying to convince the rest of us that China is falling apart.

@AngelicaOung @RossFeingold Funny thing about the Taipei elections. The latest polls from the DPP have Puma Shen leading Chiang Wan-An by double digits. When I read the polls, I started laughing. Look if you have Puma lead Chiang by 3 percent, I start getting