Day: June 14, 2018

I decided to take a break from documenting my visit to Oregon and my uncle’s health crisis to address the elections held this week in South Korea.
As my sister said, off-handedly, just now, “there are no coincidences in politics.” Thus, the fact that the Kim-DJT summit in Singapore was held this week, right before the elections, can hardly be imagined but to have been some bit of orchestration on the part of the South Koreans. And the incumbent president Moon Jae-in and his left-leaning 더불어민주당 [deobuleominjudang ~ “together democratic party”] clearly had decided that the blustery leaders’ drafty summiteering would benefit them electorally. It did.
Arguably, Korea experienced a “blue wave” such as some are forecasting for the US elections this Fall. Which is odd not just because Korea isn’t in the US, but because this is a kind of Korean mid-term, and as such, just like a US mid-term, you’d expect things to swing the other way. Since Moon had won in 2016, it seemed that things should swing rightward for this election. That didn’t happen. The main right-leaning party remains in disarray following the impeachment scandals that led to Moon’s election, and Moon is benefiting from domestic fears that Mr T is going to mess things up for South Korea.
So it goes. It’s interesting to compare the 2016 electoral map and the 2018 electoral map. You see the “blue wave”, barely noticeable and somewhat ambivalent in 2016, engulfing the country this time around. I have the 2016 map in my blog post from that election. And here is this year’s, below.

I like electoral maps. They’re interesting. Call me an amateur psephological cartographer.
[daily log: walking, 5km]