Li Sichuan is still ahead in the blue camp poll. Dai Lian: Weighting with 2018 "Korean Wave" data will cause distortion

Polls conducted by some blue-leaning media showed that KMT New Taipei mayor candidate Li Sichuan was leading Su Qiaohui in the polls. There was a huge gap with the New Taipei City mayor poll released by the People's Association today, which attracted attention from the outside world. Polling expert Dai Li'an analyzed today that some polls use the 2018 "Korean Wave" data for weighting. Compared with the current "Ocean Wave", the error is very large. Those institutions may not be intentional, but they will give results that mislead the public.

Media polls show that KMT candidate Li Sichuan leads DPP candidate Su Qiaohui by 6.7 percentage points. However, according to Dai Li'an's latest poll, Su Qiaohui's support is 43.1%, Li Sichuan's support is 30.0%, Su Qiaohui leads by 13.1 percentage points, 9.5% do not vote or cast invalid votes, and 15.8% do not answer clearly.

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Dai Li'an pointed out that the current situation is a "change in the sky", and the signal is to change the party, and the 2018 figures cannot be used for weighting. He analyzed that taking Taipei City as an example, in the 2024 regional legislative election, blue and green will get half and half votes, with green winning about 10,000 votes over blue. In the 2024 New Taipei City regional legislative election, the green one got about 46% of the votes, and the blue one got 47%. There were also five or five waves on both sides.

Dai Lian revealed that when making predictions in other polls, they generally use "blue 57% vs. green 43%." That sector weighting is that Li Sichuan will win by 6 to 7%, "but that is false" and is a phenomenon caused by improper weighting.

Dai Lian further said that if there is currently an organization that wants to predict the poll results of Li Sichuan and Su Qiaohui, he recommends not using "57% vs. 43%", and not using the 2018 figures to estimate, but using the 2024 regional legislators' vote results. The results will be closer.

Dai Li'an gave an example. Currently, some polls of Taipei or New Taipei mayors still tell you that "blue plus white is greater than green." But these are the results of sector weighting. If "pan-blue plus white" is 27% in New Taipei City, and pan-green is 37%, it is actually 10 percentage points more than pan-green. However, in some New Taipei City mayoral polls, some organizations weighted it ex post by "57% vs. 43%". Using the 2018 figures to weight it will be a big "artificial reversal" and there will be a big error in support.

The poll released by Dai Li'an today was commissioned by the People's Association to design and analyze the questionnaire, and Beacon Market Research conducted telephone interviews. From October 6 to October 8, the survey targets were people registered in New Taipei City and over the age of 20. 1,073 people were successfully interviewed (750 people from residential phones and 323 people from mobile phones). The maximum sampling error of the combined sample at a reliability level of 95% was ±3.0%.