A surprisingly large victory for the KMT tonight.  The bottom line:

       KMT     81 seats
       DPP     27 seats
      other     5 seats

     This exceeds the pre-poll forecasts, the highest of which were running at 75 KMT seats.  It also plunges the DPP below their "golden number," 38 seats, which now opens the possibility for the KMT to amend the constitution, which could pose future political problems for the greens.

      There will be much analysis in the days to come, but let me quickly kick things off with this question: what does this mean for Taiwanese identity?

       At first blush this KMT landslide suggests that Taiwanese identity failed as a political strategy for the DPP.  But we should not conflate political maneuvering and rhetoric with broadly held social and cultural understandings and practices.  Many people here (most people?) understand themselves as Taiwanese.  They see themselves as culturally and politically disticnt from PRC Chinese.  Perhaps they are now so settled and confident in that identity that they no longer believe that the DPP is the only expression of it.  They can be Taiwanese, they can perform Taiwanese-ness, in many facets of their life.   And in the political realm, the KMT is suffiently Taiwanese that many Taiwanese people trust that it will not fundamentally upset their performance of national identity.

      We should not, therefore, read this election as a reduction or decay of Taiwanese identity but, rather, its maturity.  The political and social and cultural life of Taiwan are not what they were in 2000, before the DPP scored its historic presidential victory.  The KMT victory is not a step backward to some lesser Taiwanese (and greater Chinese) past.  It is a step forward into a new Taiwanese future.

      It follows that if the DPP wants to win the presidential race in March, it is going to have to come up with a more effective political strategy.  The identity card appears not to work the way it used to.  Frank Hsieh will have to expand his  agenda and cultivate new issues to convince people that he will be a better leader than Chen Shui-bian.  Because if this evenings outcome shows anything, it is that Taiwanese people can comfortably vote KMT.