The LDP's three-way contest
Ishiba, Koizumi, and Takaichi continue to pull away from the rest of the field
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Major news organizations released a wave of new polls over the weekend that show that the LDP leadership contest remains fiercely contested with just over ten days until the party votes on 27 September. While Koizumi Shinjirō remains among the top three candidates in popularity, he no longer appears poised to break out among LDP voters, which seemed possible after polling in late August before he formally announced his candidacy. Instead, Ishiba Shigeru has regained his position as the favorite among the LDP’s rank-and-file supporters, which will ensure he remains competitive despite lingering questions about his support from LDP lawmakers.
This shift in Ishiba’s favor can be seen in the Asahi Shimbun, where Ishiba gained nine points among LDP supporters to thirty-two percent, Koizumi fell four to twenty-four percent, and Takaichi gained five to seventeen percent. Hayashi Yoshimasa performed better, climbing from zero to four percent, but virtually every other candidate – including Kamikawa Yōko, Kōno Tarō, and Kobayashi Takayuki – dropped among LDP supporters.
Koizumi’s drop was even more pronounced in the latest Nikkei Shimbun poll, where he lost eleven points among LDP supporters, falling to twenty-one percent, behind Ishiba with twenty-five percent – he gained eleven points – and Takaichi with twenty-two percent (she gained seven). The thirty-two-percent support Koizumi received in Nikkei’s August poll was an outlier, so it is possible that it was a weird artifact of that poll’s sample rather than a genuine surge in his support. Still, Takaichi’s climb is consistent with other polls, reinforcing the ideas that a) her support had room to grow and b) she is a serious contender to advance to the second round. As in the Asahi poll, Hayashi Yoshimasa was the only other candidate to gain with the start of the campaign, gaining six points to land in fourth place with seven percent. Kōno, Kamikawa, and Kobayashi are all polling at only four percent. Ishiba also enjoys an advantage among independents, with twenty-three percent saying they back him compared with eighteen percent for Koizumi and thirteen for Takaichi.
In this polling cycle, the Sankei-Fuji News poll is the most unusual. Here, Koizumi maintained his lead among LDP supporters, polling at 29.4 percent for the second consecutive month, followed by Ishiba, whose support rose a point to 24 percent. Takaichi remained a distant third, also gaining a point to 16 percent, with the others dropping. Koizumi also enjoyed a similarly large lead in Kyodo News poll directed specifically at respondents qualified to vote in the LDP leadership election, with a 27.9 percent compared to Takaichi at 21.4 percent and Ishiba at 19.7 percent.
The latter poll – targeted at LDP voters – suggests some difficulty in getting a true picture of each candidate’s support among the LDP’s rank-and-file supporters. With just over a million eligible voters across the country, it is challenging for mainstream polling organizations to capture the mood of the LDP electorate specifically, instead of the general public or self-styled LDP supporters.
Yomiuri conducted its own poll of 1500 dues-paying LDP supporters eligible to vote in the leadership election and found an entirely different outcome, with these respondents favoring Ishiba at 26 percent, Takaichi at 25 percent, and Koizumi at 16 percent. Yomiuri also asked the LDP’s 367 lawmakers who they are supporting and receiving replies from 352, although ninety-one declined to say. Based on the replies it did receive – and its estimation of the breakdown in rank-and-file voting – the newspaper estimates that Ishiba and Takaichi are tied for the lead in the first round with 123 votes each, followed by Koizumi with 105. Koizumi, however, surpassed both of the leaders among lawmakers, with forty-five compared with twenty-nine for Takaichi and twenty-six for Ishiba. Kobayashi was second among lawmakers with forty. Yomiuri’s finding was consistent with a survey by TBS-JNN, which found that Koizumi and Kobayashi are the leaders among lawmakers, with each surpassing fifty, while Ishiba and Takaichi are in the thirties.
What can we conclude from this set of surveys? First, the basic structure of the race is unchanged. No candidate appears poised to run away with the election in the first round, stampeding over the others. Two, Koizumi still has a strong chance to win, but it is difficult to call him the presumptive favorite. He is polling well enough with both the public and LDP lawmakers to suggest that he can make it to the second round, but he needs to make up some ground with the party rank-and-file, particularly among the older voters who are more likely to vote. Third, it is possible that Takaichi’s strength with rank-and-file members can compensate for the lawmakers she may lose to Kobayashi. With Kobayashi in the race, Takaichi was going to struggle to dominate with right-wing lawmakers, but if she can continue polling above twenty percent with LDP supporters, she may be in a strong position to advance. Fourth, Ishiba remains an enigma, in that his popularity has continued to hold up but we still do not know whether this time will be different with his parliamentary colleagues, particularly if he advances to the second round. Finally, it seems unlikely that one of the middle-tier candidates – Kōno, Kamikawa, and Kobayashi, all seemingly sinking in the polls – will experience a late surge and transform the dynamics of the race. If their chances seem remote ahead of the final vote, will they shed some lawmaker votes to one of the top-tier candidates?
It certainly appears that the LDP is heading to a runoff featuring two of three among Ishiba, Koizumi, and Takaichi, with very different implications for the voting in the second round depending on which pair prevails in the first round, whether a clash between the redistribution-and-regional revitalization-focused Ishiba versus the neo-liberal Koizumi; the anti-Abe Ishiba versus Abe’s intellectual successor Takaichi; or the would-be-youngest-prime-minister Koizumi versus the would-be-first-female-prime minister-Takaichi.