Liberal Japan

Why are the DPJ going to win big in the upcoming House of Councillors election? Let me give you an answer …

They will win big for two reasons:

1. Because of Shinzo Abe’s problems and scandals.
2. Because of Ichiro Ozawa’s strategizing.

I’ve been busy looking into the comfort women issue, and have still not reviewed the platform of either party carefully, which is something I really want to do. However, I willing to bet my last yen that the DPJ’s platform is far from impressive. I’m sure if I had time to look at the details what I would see were lots of promises and pork.

So with such a platform why will they win?

While the DPJ have been strong in the city districts where young urban and liberal voters have really wanted to see some changes, they have been having a hard time in the rural areas where the LDP has had core support. This means that in some single district areas, the LDP could count on their core supporters to give them the boost they needed to win in the elections.

People have argued convincingly that the DPJ can’t win in the rural districts. Here’s a good example at the blog Shisaku:

Combine this basic “knowing where your rice and fish come from” impetus–based a promise the government knows it does not have to honor–with the Abe Clique’s special message of loving the Emperor, patriotism, traditional gender roles and respect for the nation’s honored dead (remember the demographics of the rural areas are strongly titled toward the elderly) and you have a potent, almost omnipotent electoral strategy in the single-seat districts that the DPJ can only bang its poor little pointed head upon.

Yet, already in April we were seeing some strange things. In the April 8th election, before the pension funds problem, and before Matsuoka’s suicide, before Kyuma’s atomic bomb remarks, and before Akagi’s scandal, the number of LDP members in local assemblies went down from 1309 to 1208, while the DPJ went up from 205 to a surprising 374. We knew even then that something was going on.

And it was, as the poster at Shisaku that I quoted above noted:

The Democrats, having started out as the anti-Tanaka-pork-barrel fiscal reformist politicians, have been scrambling to junk their fiscal-tightening core policies in order to try to portray themselves as the true allies of the rural voters–with all the right views on agricultural and road building support. It is a bit of a stretch for the party but the leadership is promising it will not abandon the local areas just to balance the central government balance sheet.

That is Ozawa has been studying the maps intensely and and even going out to see and woo the rural voters. He’s been actively courting them.

The result? Here’s what the Yomiuri had to say this morning:

Survey: DPJ winning votes in rural areas
Provincial voters are increasingly favoring candidates fielded or endorsed by the Democratic Party of Japan in the July 29 House of Councillors election, according to a recent survey by The Yomiuri Shimbun.

An increasing number of the rural voters in the nation’s towns and villages said they likely will cast their ballots for the DPJ in the prefectural district races, despite traditionally being ardent supporters of the Liberal Democratic Party, the survey showed.
According to the fourth nationwide opinion poll on the upper house election, it was the first time the number of voters planning to vote DPJ exceeded those who said they would cast their ballot for the LDP.

With a large number of rural municipalities in the 29 prefectural districts in which there is just one contested seat, the results of the survey indicate the upcoming election will be an uphill battle for the largest ruling party.

In the past three surveys, potential voters backed the LDP and DPJ equally. However in the latest survey, conducted from Tuesday to Thursday, 27 percent of the respondents said they would vote for DPJ candidates, while 22 percent said they would support LDP candidates in the prefectural district contests.
Support for the two main parties in so-called core cities such as Aomori or Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture, mirrored that of small and medium-sized cities, according to the survey.

However, 31 percent of the respondents from large cities said they would vote for the DPJ, while 16 percent said they would back LDP candidates.

In towns and villages, 30 percent of those surveyed said they would vote for DPJ candidates while 21 percent supported the LDP.
In major cities, the DPJ proved more popular than the LDP in all four surveys regarding the prefectural district races.
However, there has been a decline in support for LDP candidates among voters in towns and villages. In the first survey, conducted June 5-7, 37 percent of those surveyed said they would vote LDP. That figure dropped to 30 percent in the second poll (June 26-28) and rose slightly to 31 percent in the previous survey (July 3-5).

The corresponding figure for the DPJ, meanwhile, started at 22 percent, before dropping to 21 percent and then 15 percent in the previous survey. But in the latest survey, the number of respondents choosing to back the DPJ jumped to 30 percent.
DPJ leader Ichiro Ozawa has placed importance on campaigning in rural areas and has been stumping in such locations. One of his party’s pledges is to provide subsidies to farmers to compensate gaps between the costs of production and market prices.

These percentages may look small, however, they are very significant. We already know that most of the swing vote will go the DPJ. During the April 22 election for two Upper House seats that had been vacated, the DPJ capture most of the swing votes in both elections, even though they lost in Okinawa.

So, if we can count on the swing voters going over to the DPJ, and we already know the DPJ is winning the non-swing vote … well let me ask you this, what is one word can you use to describe the situation in Japan where one party manages to capture both the rural and the urban vote?

Landslide.

Tranvision Vamp — Landslide of Love

Fleetwood Mac — Landslide