Thailand's Political Map

Heartlands and floaters on Thailand’s political map
3 january 2008

By Chang Noi

The election has split the country into three parts. The two major parties each have their own heartland where people seem to be voting ever more loyally by party. In between, there is a floating zone, where voting is more personal, and loyalties more fickle.

The map shows the constituency results from the Election Commission before any red or yellow cards. This is how people voted on 23 December. One dot is one MP.

Both PPP/TTT and the Democrats now have a strong heartland. The heartland of the Democrats has two main parts: the south (excluding the Muslim far south), and the inner part of the capital. The Democrats also did well in the western hills and on the eastern seaboard. The Democrats had done well on-and-off here in the past, but had lost some of their grip in the 2005 landslide. Now they are back. Their most striking gain came in Chonburi and Rayong where they creamed all twelve seats, monopolized by TRT at the 2005 poll.

The heartland of the PPP/TTT has three main parts; the upper north; the inner core of the northeast, excluding the east and west wings; and the penumbra of Bangkok – the outer wards and surrounding provinces, with a large population of factory workers and other migrants.

In both the TRT and Democrat heartlands, people now seem to vote mainly by party. At this poll, they tended to vote “yok team,” so that the three winners in a triple-member constituency each had roughly the same vote. Over the four polls since 2001, the loyalty in these two areas has become stronger and more consistent. Across the three segments of its heartland, PPP lost only 10 out of around 200 seats. In the two segments of their heartland, the Democrats lost only five out of 120. In both these heartlands, the percentage of the vote going to the favored party has tended to increase steadily from 2001 to 2007. The divide is deepening.

There is a third zone which votes very, very differently. This zone includes the lower north, most of the central region, the western and eastern wings of the northeast, and the Muslim far south. Here voters seem to be choosing the person rather than the party. There is no sign of voting ‘yok team.’ In 28 of the 44 constituencies in this zone, the winners were spread across two or three parties. Consistency over time is no better. There are places which voted Chat Thai in 2001, TRT in 2005, and Democrat in 2007.

Up to 2001, much of this third zone was divided up into fiefdoms of the old political godfathers. Some of the voting shifts from election to election can be explained by these godfathers bargaining their loyalty to different parties. But some of the shifts are the result of the declining grip of these old political warhorses. Chavalit’s fiefdom on the Mekong fringe, and Kamnan Po’s on the eastern seaboard, have crumbled away. Those of Suwat and Snoh have dwindled down to their own backyards. Only Banharn is hanging on. Especially since the expansion of elective local government over the last decade, local politics in this zone has become fiercely competitive. Families rise and fall. Alliances gel and decay. At this poll, the new parties won almost all their sprinkling of seats in this zone, often because they opened their doors to some ambitious local politicians on the upswing.

This third zone now contains the floating vote of Thai electoral politics. To win convincingly, a party will have to win in this zone. TRT did so in 2005, but PPP failed to do so this time.

There was one another striking feature of this election result. In the constituency vote, the Democrats trailed PPP by 132 seats to 199, and by around 21 million votes to 25 million. But on the party list, the Democrats trailed PPP by only one seat and by only 100,000 votes. How did this difference come about?

Around 4.2 million people voted for one of the smaller parties when electing the constituency MPs, but then plumped for one of the two big parties when casting their party-list vote. This sort of pattern is very common, and makes sense. In selecting their MP, voters may choose someone they know and like, irrespective of party. But when it comes to the party list, they want to have their say on the big issue of the election, which in this case was the rivalry between PPP and the Democrats. Not surprisingly, this transfer voting was highest in the third floating zone where party loyalties seem more changeable.

The big surprise came in how these 4.2 million transfer votes were distributed. Two out of every three went to the Democrats, and only one out of three to PPP.

Only in the northeast, did PPP get the lion’s share of these transfer votes. In all the other regions, including the north, by far the majority went to the Democrats.

What does this mean? Maybe, these transfer voters were not so much for the Democrats as against Samak. Thaksin must always have known that hiring Samak as his stand-in was a gamble. In retrospect, it seems to have been a bad play. Samak did not deliver the vote for PPP in Bangkok, and may have scared off many party-list voters in the provinces where he is openly despised.

But maybe this party list vote has a message for the Democrats. Perhaps they lost this election not so much because they did not command voter sentiment but because they did not have good candidates – especially in the floating zone. If everyone who voted Democrat on the party list had also voted Democrat on the constituency poll, the Democrats would have been snapping at PPP’s heels.