July polling round up

Sim Sang-jung Assembly member for Goyang A, and former presidential candidate for the Justice Party who have been enjoying a good few weeks in the polls. 

Short version: Moon and the Democrats have had quite a massive chunk out of their ratings over the last month but were doing so well to start with they are still doing fine. The Democrats remain incredibly popular and Moon remains significantly more popular than his party. Moon’s very popular handling of the North Korea issue has been out of the news and voters minds and his still popular but nowhere as popular handling of the economy more prominent so Moon’s ratings and his parties are down a bit. Also a scandal around a lefty blogger who may or may not have had had ties to the Moon administration has been in the news a lot.

Moon Jae in approval

Real Meter has him at 62% approval 33% disapproval. This follows a quite sharp decline in his approval ratings and uptick in his disapproval since the local elections as shown here:

The local elections were in the 2^nd week of June (6월 2주).

Gallup has shown the same trend with 62% saying Moon is ‘doing well’ and 28% saying Moon is doing badly.

Research view appear to have stopped polling.

Political party polling 

Political party polling follows a similar trend with the Democrats dipping sharply after the local elections but retaining a substantial lead.

In Real Meter Polls the numbers  are Democrats on 45%, Liberty Korea on 19%, Justice on 11%, Righteous Future on 8%, Peace and Democracy on 3% others on 2% and don’t know on 14%.

Dark Blue is the Democrats, Red is Liberty Korea , Yellow is Justice, Light Blue is Righteous Future and Green is Democracy and Peace. Graph doesn’t include the latest poll.

Gallup has the Democrats on 48%, Liberty Korea on 11%, Justice Party 11% Righteous Future on 5% Democracy and Peace on 1% and don’t know on 23%. Gallup don’t seem to have adjusted there methods from when they were the least accurate pollster at the local elections and I’d probably suggest they are still underestimating Liberty Korea.

Also note that while the Democrats are on a downward trajectory neither the Liberty Korea nor the Righteous Future Party is making much of a recovery from their pretty disastrous results last month. the main beneficiary is ‘don’t know’ however the Justice Party is doing better as well. The Justice party are to the left of the Democrats and unlike the Democrats the Justice Party would probably pass muster as a liberal political party in the west or in Taiwan. Parties to the left of the Democrats have got around 10% of the vote before for example the United Progressive Party in 2013 which was ultimately banned as it was allegedly led by a revolutionary pro northern organisation.* Justice got 8% of the vote in June’s local elections and 7% in the proportional section of the parliament elections so polling in the low double figures is not some huge breakthrough but it is a further sign is some stability to the left of the Democrats now with a party with no North Korea connections, a clear leftist critique of the Moon government, a few national assembly members, a decent base of local government representatives with steadily rising support. It also probably gives the Democrats even more wiggle room in the 2020 National Assembly elections as this election uses a First past the post and a Proportional System. In past elections Korean voters who support smaller parties have often split their votes- voting for their first preference in the proportional section while choosing their favourite of the two main parties in the first past the post section. Almost every Justice party voter would pick the Democrats over the Liberty Korea party.

The Democrats are declining. Hey, what’s going on?

In South Korean politics North Korea is generally not that big a deal. However, with all the summits  recent months it was at the top of the news. North Korea and foreign affairs was cited by over 3/5ths of Moon supporters as their main reason for supporting him in June. In the 2 months or so before the local elections even the Liberty Korea parts of the press lent its qualified support to the peace process while the Democrat party supporting press got a tad carried away and was running lots of stories about what would happen in a unified Korea. The Democrats had the peace process at the centre of their campaign in June. However the economy, not inter-Korean affairs were at the centre of Moon’s campaign for the Presidency and are returning as the main issue

Economic performance in South Korea has remained ok with around 3% growth and unemployment around 4% just as it was during much of Park Gyun-hye’s presidency. Moon promised to dramatically improve on Park’s performance which hasn’t yet happened. He has had some limited success in passing reforms to increase the minimum wage and though these have attracted dissent both from those who oppose these reforms and those who would like South Korea to move quicker towards having standards comparable with most of the developed world. 37% of those who say Moon is doing badly do so because of their disapproval of his economic record according to Gallup while 12% cite the minimum wage hike and 5% cite the income tax rise both of which are clearly economic issues. 50% of Moon’s supporters cite vague positive feelings as their reason for backing him [more precisely they cite working hard for the common people (10%), has a will to pass reforms (7%), working hard (7%), working hard for the nation (5%), doing well (5%), better than the last President (2%) and don’t know (14%)]. The biggest concrete reason remains North Korea/foreign policy related at 37% [more precisely North Korea relations (13%), diplomacy (12%) and talking to the North (12%)]. Economic policy is cited by just 1% of his supporters while the only policy change that is cited by a non-negligible number of people for backing Moon is the minimum wage increase at 2%.  To be clear Moon Jae-in’s handling of the economy is still quite popular just nowhere near as popular as his handling of the North Korea issue. Therefore, as North Korea resumes its usual place in the middle pages of the newspapers and the back of Korean's minds his numbers and his party’s numbers have returned to landslide victory levels of support rather than the unprecedented, super-massive unbelievable landslide level they were at before.

There is also an ongoing scandal in South Korea around the blogger ‘Druking’. The popular left leaning blogger has been charged with ‘opinion rigging’ by manipulating likes on Naver Korea’s main search engine and blog posting website. While he turned against Moon around the Winter Olympics  he was once one of his most prominent online boosters. The scandal has been back in the news recently as there have been calls for a special prosecutor to investigate links between members of the Moon administration and ‘Druking’.  A prominent assembly member of the Justice Party, No Hoe-Chan, took his own life on the 23^rd of July while he was under investigation for accepting a $35,000 donation from Druking. There’s not been any polling on it as far as I can tell but it can’t be helping Moon.   

* My understanding of the case is that the party was initially an uneasy coalition between Korea’s tiny number of liberals and tiny number of North Korea supporters. The North Korea lot were rigging primaries so the liberals organised a meeting to try to remove the North Korea group from top positions. The North Korea group got wind of this, turned up and started beating people up, the liberals left the party so the North Korea faction had complete control. One of their leaders (Lee Seok-Ki) was caught on tape explaining how the North was about to invade and how he was going to help them. He was sent to prison for 12 years and his party was banned.

The Real Meter polls were taken from 23rd-25th of July

Gallup Polls taken from the 24^th-26^th July