PacNet #52 - Taiwan Election Upset: Now What?

Efforts to outguess the voters frequently embarrassed politicians and pundit alike this year. In presidential elections this past spring, incumbents Chen Shui-bian and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo were supposed to be soundly defeated; both won (albeit, in Chen’s case, by the slimmest of margins). Conversely, in India, incumbent Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was supposed to win big, but was defeated handily. Even in the United States, many voters went to sleep on election eve confident, as a result of exit poll predictions, that “regime change” had occurred in Washington, only to awake to four more years of the Bush administration.