The DPJ Leadership Election: Mainichi’s Remarkable Headcount

Mainichi canvassed all the DPJ Diet members to see where they stood on the Kan-Ozawa showdown. Adding information regarding their respective groups as well as the labor unions—(many DPJ Diet members rely to varying degrees on support from the labor unions), it has come up with a prospective breakdown of the votes. The resources of the local bureaus are being put to good use*, I see.

	Kan	Ozawa	undecided	total
Upper House	35	46	25	106
Lower House	129	139	38	306
LH rookies	55	65	23	143
total	164	185	63	412

Other bits and pieces of information:

1. Although Ozawa leads Kan 185 to 164 in total support, the two are tied at 122 each in firm votes; the others are merely leaning towards one or the other and presumably could be swayed.

2. Of the lower house rookies, Ozawa leads handily 22 to 8 (with 5 undecided) among those who ran solely on the regional proportional ticket, but Kan leads 47 to 43 (with 18 undecided) among those elected from single-seat districts and those who ran on both tickets and got by on the regional proportional ticket. Take out the pure proportionals, i.e. Ozawa’s truly handpicked candidates, and the “Ozawa Children” look remarkably like the rest of the DPJ’s lower house members.

3. Mainichi attributes Ozawa’s upper house lead to the preponderance of labor union affiliates there.

4. The single biggest factor that has the potential to affect the numbers in the near-term is the collective intent (if any) of the 30 or so members of the old Social Democratic Party group. Media reports say that they are likely to make up their minds early in the week. One weekend report said the group would be opting on Monday (today) to support Kan**.

* Yomiuri carried a similar report, but I could not find it online. One of the more remarkable points in the Yomiuri report was that a few Ozawa group members intended to vote for Ozawa, while the Kan group also had its share of Ozawa supporters.

** Even if the ex-DSPers don’t reach a collective decision, I am now more confident that my call of a Kan victory is the correct one. More about that later.

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In case anyone hasn’t noticed, the Wall Street Journal seems as good a place as any for a daily fix on the DPJ leadership election—if you can’t read Japanese. Just punch in a keyword or two and you should be able to pick up more WSJ and non-WSJ media links than is probably healthy for you. And if your interest in Japan is broader than that, you could probably do worse than using its Japan Real Time blog as a portal. Still, I don’t think that you’ll find the Mainichi report there, and it’s not often that you’ll find these kinds of numbers, so I thought I’d let you know.