As the U.S. prepares for the 2024 presidential race to begin in earnest on Monday with the Iowa Caucuses, across the Pacific, voters in Taiwan are headed to the polls to cast their votes in their presidential election Saturday.

Earlier this week, The American Conservative commissioned a great primer on the elections, titled “Taiwan’s Time for Choosing” by the Pacific Forum’s Robert York. The matchup features incumbent Vice President Lai Ching-te, the nominee for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the Kuomintang’s (KMT) Hou Yu-ih, the mayor of New Taipei City, and third-party candidate Ko Wen-Je.

As things currently stand, Lai and the DPP are leading in the polls, but the margin varies widely from around 3 to 10 percent. Though the outgoing president, the DPP’s Tsai Ing-wen, dominated the last two presidential elections, the party has struggled in recent years with scandals and losses in local elections.

Nevertheless, “the money is on Lai winning the election at this point,” Michael Swaine, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute told TAC in a phone interview. “If Lai does win—and then we have to see what the results are of the legislative council elections and what the relative position will be of the DPP and the Kuomintang are—does Beijing issue any kind of statement, do anything really unexpected?”

The DPP has managed to maintain their advantage because the KMT has struggled to capitalize. “The basic problem here is that the Kuomintang is still struggling to define itself in ways that don't appear to be so pro-Chinese,” Swaine stated. That is especially the case given the party’s last president, Ma Ying-jeou, perceived as someone who bent over backwards for Beijing, remains in the picture.

Earlier this week, Ma claimed in an interview that, despite wargame projections, Taiwan would quickly fall to China. “No matter how you defend yourself, you can never fight a war with the mainland. You can never win,” Ma reportedly said. “They’re too large, much stronger than us.” Ma allegedly believes that if China moved on Taiwan, the island wouldn’t be able to fend the Chinese off long enough for potential U.S. forces to assist.

The headlines Ma has inspired in the run up to the election have created a headache for Hou and other KMT candidates, who have tried to distance themselves from the former president’s comments and policies throughout the campaign.

Ko, the third-party candidate, countered Ma’s claims and said, “trusting others (China) from the start is too dangerous.” Ko went on to add that under his leadership, Taiwan’s defense spending would increase to 3 percent of the island’s GDP.

Lai and the DPP saw Ma’s comments as an opportunity to suggest that the KMT’s shift towards a more balanced relationship between Washington and Beijing, rather than leaning more towards the mainland, is disingenuous.

While it’s a partisan accusation to be sure, whether the KMT’s foreign policy realignment is genuine and reflects a shift in Taiwan’s electoral politics is one of the many good questions to ask before Taiwan heads to the ballot box Saturday.

“I believe the shift in the KMT is real but it’s difficult to judge how big the shift is,” Eric Gomez, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, told TAC via email. “Clearly, the rapid growth in cross strait economic integration seen under Ma is no longer resonant with Taiwan’s voters,” which has added incentives for Hou and the KMT to change course. Yet the escalation between Taiwan and the mainland over the past eight years means the KMT can look voters in the eye and tell them, “the DPP have been in control now for eight years and China is doing these daily operations in our ADIZ, vote for us because we know how to sit at the table with Beijing and produce tangible benefits.”

Throughout the campaign, Hou has laid out his policy with respect to Beijing in three D’s: deterrence, dialogue, and de-escalation. Hou, Swaine said, is “trying to strike that balance and say, ‘We’re going to step away from the DPP’s tension-inducing types of policies, we’re gonna move towards moderating the situation with Beijing, opening up lines of communication with them, but we're not going to do something that shows we’re willing to do whatever is necessary to court Beijing.’ So he's trying to straddle that, and that’s where the Kuomintang has a real challenge because their messaging on this still, I don’t think, is generating sufficient support within the Taiwan public. They’re still suspicious that the Kuomintang is going to be too pro-China.”

As for Ma, Gomez said, “I don’t think Ma represents the mainstream of current KMT thinking, but his remarks do raise an important point about Taiwan’s self defense prospects.”

“I read Ma’s statements in two ways,” Gomez explained. “First, we can’t win a war on our own, therefore we need more diplomatic contact with China to avoid hostilities (Which I won’t oppose more cross strait diplomacy). Second, we can’t win on our own therefore we need the U.S. to show up. And I think both parties are doing things that they think will maximize the likelihood of US intervention in a war. The DPP by emphasizing democracy vs authoritarianism, and the KMT by trying to be more responsible about not pissing off Beijing. Same goal, different approaches to reaching it.”

With President Joe Biden at the helm, the DPP’s framing of democracy versus authoritarianism might just be the better sales pitch, but does the DPP’s rhetoric risk destabilization?

“I think the DPP is very serious about improving Taiwan’s military, which restrainers should welcome,” said Gomez. Nevertheless, Gomez said restrainers should worry that the DPP’s “political stances will make it much harder to do cross strait diplomacy with Beijing, and the DPP is more likely than the KMT to push for political shows of support by the U.S. that China could use as a rationale for escalating day to day tensions.” Gomez cited China’s response to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit in August of 2022.

“The real question” for China watchers in the U.S., Swaine says, is if China will “do something beyond sort of saber rattling and some rhetorical bluster and really throw us back into the soup again, in terms of relations between the U.S. and China and the military situation in the Taiwan Strait?” It’s impossible to know for sure, but Swaine told TAC that “the Chinese have not, I don’t think, telegraphed that they are going to resort to some radical new kind of thing”:

My guess is that you will have some harsh rhetoric that will be in line with what they've already said. You might have some kind of symbolic actions that involve some violations again, of the midline of the straight, of the sort of thing that the PLA has been doing rather routinely, but perhaps more intensively.

Lai, Swaine says, has “been very consistent recently in wanting to be very restrained and moderate in his rhetoric, and he’s certainly provided assurances along those lines to Washington.”

The scary scenario is an extreme crisis, which is unlikely. Nevertheless, things could get very tense if “more pessimism about the idea of a peaceful unification,” leads China to more aggressive kinds of saber-rattling, said Swaine. Such a response from Beijing could lead “people in the Congress and in the U.S. policy community to say, ‘Oh, well, look, the Chinese are really escalating the situation now. They’ve crossed the Rubicon, they really don't believe in the possibility of peaceful unification. We need to up our game, we need to respond now with much greater assurances, much greater aggressiveness,’ and then you get support for strategic clarity—throwing away the idea of strategic ambiguity.”

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While the DPP is expected to win the upcoming election, a KMT victory could vindicate their approach to cross-strait relations. “KMT has cooled toward greater cross strait integration with China, while still trying to present itself as the main Taiwan party that can have a functional relationship with Beijing,” Gomez said. The era of a KMT that brokers large economic deals with China, as Ma did in his tenure, would be over.

“The main interest in the Taiwanese elections is that Taiwan does not get us into a war with China,” John Quincy Adams Society Executive Director John Allen Gay told TAC. “For America, Taipei needs leadership that will radically upgrade and re-envision its military to be more capable of deterring Beijing. It also needs leadership that will not amplify tensions with Beijing.”

“Ideally,” Gay continued, “Taiwan remains sovereign and we don’t have to fight for it to remain sovereign. The worst case for America is a cheap hawk Taiwan: a weak military and a provocative line towards Beijing, leaving Beijing undeterred and American troops to do the fighting. I’d like to see the Taiwanese, under whatever leadership, show they care more about their own security than we do.”