Bangkok

The Democrats comprehensively defeated Puea Thai in the local elections held on Sunday. For the district council elections, the Democrats won 210 seats, Puea Thai 39 seats, and independent candidates seven. For the city council elections, the Democrats won 45 seats, Puea Thai 15 and an independent won the other seat.

Will focus on the city council elections as can’t find complete data for the district council elections,* but can for the city council elections so will focus on them. The data for the city council elections is derived from Nation Channel. They do not appear to be the final figures and there will probably be absentee ballots etc. They were compiled by Federico Ferrara and kindly passed onto BP (if it matters BP checked the vote counts of four random districts on the Nation Channel website with the spreadsheet from Federico and all the vote counts were correct). A copy of the spreadsheet with various calculations is here. Vote counts for the 2007 general election constituency votes are available as a spreadsheet here.

NOTE: These spreadsheets are provided as a resource for others and to help fact check BP.

The key points:

1. In the 2007 general election, the Democrats won 27 seats to PPP’s 9 (PPP being the predecessor to Puea Thai before it was dissolved). In the 2010 city council elections, the Democrats won 45 seats to Puea Thai’s 15.

BP: Observant readers will notice a pattern of the Democrats winning exactly three times the number of seats in both elections. In the 2007 city council elections, the Democrats won 40 seats. PPP won 20 seats in 2006, but later five councilors defected to to the Democrats leaving PPP/Puea Thai with 15 which they retained.

2. In the 2007 general election, the Democrats received 3,748,067 votes or 48.88% of the vote; PPP won 3,083,118 votes or 40.21% of the vote. In the 2010 city council elections, the Democrats received 750,313 votes or 50.65% of the vote; Puea Thai won 581,617 votes or 39.25% of the vote. The major third party was New Politics Party who won 105,416 votes or 7.11% of the vote.

NOTE: Vote counts are skewed in the general election as each voter voted three times while only once in the city council elections so don’t be mistaken as thinking turn-out was five times higher.

Puea Thai lost 1% compared with PPP’s 2007 general election performance; the Democrats won just under 2% more than their 2007 general election performance. It shows you how little has changed for  the vote counts of the two major parties since 2007. However, NPP are a bit of a wildcard as in theory their voters would have voted Democrat if the NPP was not contesting, but for the foreseeable future they are. It is certainly possible they will not contest all Bangkok seats at the next general election so their votes will likely go to the Democrats (although one shouldn’t discount some voters not voting because of their unhappiness with the Democrats turning a blind eye to the corruption by the Democrats and their coalition partners). Also, in in a general election the Democrat’s coalition partners would been competing so they would take away votes from the Democrats (and also Puea Thai).

3. Did NPP hurt the Democrats? Well, assuming that all NPP voters would have voted for the Democrats, by BP’s calculations the Democrats would have two more seats (Thonburi and Saphan Suung) if the NPP had not contested the elections – so a 47 to 13 split.

4. The reason why the NPP didn’t cause the Democrats to lose even more seats was that in the eight closest races (i.e with the margin being 184, 386, 433, 523, 727, 738, 794, and 875 votes respectively), they were all won by the Democrats. This has been BP’s thesis all along. The NPP won’t win that many seats – they are more likely to pick up list seats in the general election than electorate seats – but they will cost the Democrats the chance of victory in a number of seats. This is more likely to be the case in urban areas in Central, Northern, and Northeastern Thailand. It should be said that 7% is nothing to be sneezed at for their first effort (well, BP never thought they would get than many votes in the first place so am not surprised). BP views they could get potentially get 3-5% of the party list vote in a general election giving them anywhere between 3-7 party lists seats depending on what electoral system we have in place at the next election.

5. It should be also noted in 13 seats the candidate of the Democrats received at least twice the number of votes of  the Puea Thai candidate. In no seats though did the  Puea Thai candidate receive double the number of votes of the the Democrat candidate.

6. For talk of Bangkokians suddenly becoming bored of politics, well in the last local elections in 2006 turnout was only 0.8% more so it hardly suggests any groundswell of dissatisfaction because of recent political events.

The reality is that the local politicians have little power and there is very little focus on what happens at the city council level as national politics dominate.

*In case you think that the Democrats domination in the District Council elections of winning 210 seats is surprising and may suggest a fundamental move to the Democrats in the Bangkok electorate, well it doesn’t. The Democrats won 203 seats in 2006.

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